IIAS Newsletter 41

Illustration by Chiara Dissette, www.dissette.com

IIAS Newsletter 41 | Summer 2006 | free of charge | published by IIAS | P.O. Box 9515 | 2300 RA Leiden | The Netherlands | T +31-71-527 2227 | F +31-71-527 4162 | iias@let.leidenuniv.nl | www.iias.nl

G r e g o r y Fo r t h

Conferences and exhibitions: pp. 36-39

Documentary film Nalini by Day, Nancy by Night: pp. 20-21

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Thinking with 19th century photographs of Japan: pp. 18-19

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International law in an imperfect world: pp. 4-9

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International law?

refers to a widespread image whose ontological status is unclear. We don’t really know what wildmen are, whether or not they exist, or in what sense they could exist. Are they purely imaginary categories (as cultural anthropologists, historians and other practitioners of the humanities have usually supposed) or do they have a substantial grounding in empirical, or zoological, reality? What is their relation to beings that anthropologists usually call spirits, which have typically been conceived as the very opposite of the empirical? This is the abridged introductory lecture to the IIAS masterclass ‘Images of the Wildman in Southeast Asia’.

>

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Wildman: a branch of Homo or something hairy in our subconscious? pp. 1 & 10-11

41

M

y interest in Southeast Asian wildmen was first sparked during doctoral field research some 30 years ago on Sumba, in eastern Indonesia, where I heard about a large hairy figure variously called makatoba, meu rumba or mili mongga.

In particular, I was struck by the apparent similarity between this Sumbanese wildman and the sasquatch or Bigfoot, a creature I had heard much about during my previous residence in western Canada. Then, some years later, shortly after beginning further field research in the Nage region of central Flores (also in eastern Indonesia), I came across another figure, a kind of hairy hominoid called ebu gogo, which was generally similar to the Sumbanese mili mongga but different in some respects and seemingly more realistic. (For one thing, the ebu gogo were described as extinct, having been exterminated by Nage ancestors some 200 years previously. For another, Nage were able to describe the physical and behavioural features of the reputedly extinct creatures, and to do so consistently and in some detail.) From subsequent reading, I discovered that creatures similar to the wildmen of Flores and Sumba had been reported from several parts of Indonesia and main-

land Southeast Asia, and I started to think about producing a book-length comparative study. When I began I was not at all sure what form the book might eventually take. But I was interested primarily in the wildman as a cultural image and how, or how far, this sort of image could be understood symbolically, as an expression of social, ideological, or historical factors. By the same token, I did not think it would be necessary to pay too much attention to possible empirical bases of the images.

But then something happened that diverted my largely cultural anthropological interests in the topic and drew them in a rather different direction. Not long after I started writing about Southeast Asian wildman figures, using the Florenese ebu gogo as my point of departure, the news broke of the discovery on Flores of Homo floresiensis. This, as we all learned in October 2004, was a new species of the genus Homo, possibly a descendant through endemic dwarfing of Homo erectus. The skeleton was a fairly elderly female who stood just over a metre high and who had a brain no larger than a chimpanzee’s. continued on page 10

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2 3 3

Asia studies in the 21st century / Wim Stokhof Chinese design – designing Chineseness / Jeroen de Kloet Veil / Muhammed Hassanali

International law?

4 International law: power and participation in the 21st century / Suzana Dudic From Tokyo to The Hague / Liu Daqun 5 6 & 8 Can corporations be held legally responsible for serious human rights violations? / Ilaria Bottigliero 7 & 9 Civil society and the search for justice: the Tokyo women’s tribunal / Tina ­Dolgopol 8 & 9 Human rights between Europe and Southeast Asia / Simone Eysink

Research 1 & 10-11 Wildman / Gregory Forth Sex in the city / Lena Scheen 12 Whose comrades? Gay festivals in China / Remy Cristini 13 Ida Bagus Nyoman Rai: painter of history / Adrian Vickers and Leo Haks 14 Engaging cultures across the Timor Sea / Georgia Sedgwick 15 Bhutanese Nepalis or Nepali Bhutanese? / Satya Shrestha-Schipper 16 Political turmoil in Cambodia / Michael Vickery 17 18-19 Photographing the Ogasawara Islands: thinking with 19th century photographs of Japan / David Odo

Reviews 20-21 20-21 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29

British imperial collapse in Asia / Bali Sahota Nalini by day, Nancy by night / Maya Kulkarni To the professional assassin / Sarker Amin Beyond state and nation in South Asia / Hastings Donnan Social space and governance in urban China / Elisabeth Lund Engebretsen Southeast Asia: one or many? / Marcus von Essen Autobiography of an Indian indentured labourer / Victor van Bijlert Creating the mindset for total war / Donald M. Seekins Polite language in modern Japan / Manfred B. Sellner Twenty-five centuries of body and face in China / Lucien van Valen Books received

International Institute for Asian Studies 30 31 32 33 33 34-35 36-37 38-39

IIAS fellows IIAS research Voices of Islam in Europe and Southeast Asia / Cynthia Chou and Patrick Jory European Alliance for Asian Studies International Convention of Asia Scholars Announcements International arts agenda / Carol Brash International conference agenda

The International Institute for Asian Studies is a postdoctoral research centre based in Leiden and Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

Our main objective is to encourage the interdisciplinary and comparative study of Asia and to promote national and international cooperation in the field. The institute focuses on the humanities and social sciences and their interaction with other sciences.

IIAS values dynamism and versatility in its research programmes. Post-doctoral research fellows are temporarily employed by or affiliated to IIAS, either within a collaborative research programme or individually.

In its aim to disseminate broad, in-depth knowledge of Asia, the institute organizes ­seminars, workshops and conferences, and publishes the IIAS Newsletter with a circulation of 26,000.

IIAS runs a database for Asian Studies with information on researchers and research-related institutes worldwide. As an international mediator and a clearing-house for knowledge and information, IIAS is active in creating international networks and launching international cooperative projects and research programmes. In this way, the institute functions as a window on Europe for non-European scholars and contributes to the cultural rapprochement between Asia and Europe.

IIAS also administers the secretariat of the European Alliance for Asian Studies (Asia Alliance: www. asia-alliance.org) and the Secretariat General of the ­International Convention of Asia ­Scholars (ICAS: www.icassecretariat.org). Updates on the activities of the Asia Alliance and ICAS are ­published in this newsletter.

<

www.iias.nl

IIAS Newsletter | #41 | Summer 2006

Director’s note

Contents #41

Asia studies in the 21st century E

urope is not achieving its Lisbon goals of becoming the world’s leading knowledge economy. Member states are making insufficient use of the internal market, while problems continue to plague Europe’s knowledge and innovation policy. Investment in R&D and education remain inadequate, while there is no real mechanism – nor the political will – to implement the Lisbon goals at national levels. To envision the future of funding for Asia studies in 21st century Europe, we must examine how the EU plans to implement its €70 billion Seventh Framework Programme of the European Community for Research 2007-2013.

Lisbon envisioned spending 3% of GDP on R&D. Currently 1.90% of the EU’s GDP is devoted to R&D, compared to 2.59% in the US and 3.12% in Japan. Closely related to the goal of spending 3% of GDP on R&D was the idea of a European Research Area (ERA), which grew out of the realisation that European research was suffering from three weaknesses: insufficient funding; lack of an environment to stimulate research and exploit results; and the fragmented nature of activities and dispersal of resources. With the realisation of the ERA, European research would become as familiar a concept as the single market or the single currency today. But we have to conclude that the ERA has so far not materialised, and that knowledge and innovation policies remain the domain of the national states. Will the Seventh Framework Programme give the ERA new impetus?

EU officials believe it will. They pin their hopes on the European Research Council and its governing body, the Scientific Council, which has outlined two funding streams: one to establish and support excellence among young independent researchers, the other to support research projects on the frontiers of knowledge.

Noting the need for cross-fertilisation at the interface of scientific fields, the Scientific Council intends to support inter-disciplinary research.

While this is not a bad development per se, I fear that only a sliver of the total budget will be made available to the humanities and social sciences. The Seventh Framework Programme commands €70 billion, 7% of the total EU budget, or about €10 billion a year, to be divided between four categories: ‘Co-operation’, ‘Ideas’, ‘People’ and ‘Capacities’. I dwell only on ‘Co-operation’ as it is the most likely to harbour funding possibilities. Only one of its nine subcategories appears relevant to the study of Asia: ‘Socio-Economic Sciences and the Humanities’, allotted €800 million out of Co-operation’s €45 billion, a little more than €100 million a year.

Worse, only one of its seven envisioned items – ‘Europe in the world’ – can be considered a target for applications, as it aims to understand changing interactions and inter-dependencies between world regions and their implications. It then specifies: especially for Europe.

The future of EU funding for Asia studies thus looks bleak. Most of the money goes to megalomaniac projects in the hard sciences and technology. Worse, its Europecentered research programme remains mired in parochialism and defensiveness, reinforcing views of us (Europe) against the US, Europe against Asia. Nor can I discern in the latest plan how the problem of translating European initiatives to national contexts will be addressed. Add to this the incapacity of most research institutes and researchers to work together to reach a critical mass to influence science policy in Brussels, and a gloomy picture arises. I even fear that funding for Asia studies will decrease – an absurdity given the rising importance of Asia in the world. Maybe Asia will fund Asia studies in Europe. One thing is certain: the future of Asia studies lies in Asia itself. But we should not forget that the study of Asia is part and parcel of Europe’s cultural heritage.

Can the profile of Asia studies be improved in other ways? One avenue is to introduce what is going on in academia to larger audiences through lectures, public discussions, newsletters, TV and radio programmes, cultural events and exhibitions, and through meetings that gather all stakeholders in the field such as the conferences of regional studies associations, the Association for Asian Studies (AAS) and the International Convention of Asia Scholars (ICAS).

Although I will remain secretary general of ICAS, I will no longer be director of IIAS as of 1 September 2006. I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to everyone I have worked with since IIAS’ foundation in 1993. In particular I would like to thank the board members, members of the academic committee, and my staff – past and present – for their dedication and inspiration. I wish my successor Max Sparreboom all the best. < Wim Stokhof Director, IIAS

> Comment

Chinese design – designing Chineseness* about

the

we

in…

for

IIAS Newsletter

Letters, commentary, opinion Research essays, photo essays, interviews Book, journal, film, website reviews Fiction, poetry, visual art

These questions foreground the classic inquiry of inter-cultural dialogue: what, then, can we learn and unlearn from each other? < Jeroen de Kloet International Institute for Asian Studies Department of Media Studies, University of Amsterdam b.j.dekloet@uva.nl

paper on meeting of Dutch and Chinese designers in Amsterdam, * 12Position June 2006, organised by the Premsela Foundation. www.premsela.org Exhibition in Rotterdam: China Contemporary, Architecture, Art and Visual

IIAS Newsletter | #41 | Summer 2006

Muhammed Hassanali Cleveland, Ohio, USA Hassanali@juno.com

­F lorida.

- Shirazi, Faegheh. 2001. The Veil Unveiled: The Hijab in Modern Culture. University Press of

- El Guindi, Fadwa. 1999. Veil Modesty, Privacy and Resistance. Berg.

­U niversity Press.

- Alvi, Sajida. 2003. The Muslim Veil in North America: Issues and Debates. Women’s Press.

- Ahmed, Leila. 1992. Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate. Yale

Culture. See arts agenda p.36 and www.chinacontemporary.nl

For further reading

Takeo David Hymans & Natasja Kershof editors iiasnews@let.leidenuniv.nl

It is difficult to say if the veil is being lifted or becoming more entrenched. What is certain is that in many cases references to the veil are actually references to what it symbolises. One needs to realize that while what the veil symbolises may evoke strong responses, the veil itself is amoral and apolitical. <

The veil was not common in the Muslim empire until late in the 10th century, and was introduced to Muslims through their Persian conquest. In antiquity, only upper class Assyrian women were required by law to wear veils, while slaves and servants were explicitly forbidden from veiling. Muslims initially adopted the veil to represent social status; only later did the veil symbolise modesty. While the Islamic injunction to dress modestly has a wide range of interpretations, by the 16th century, yashmak (veil) had become obligatory in the Ottoman empire.

Veil

It could be so thin as to be invisible, or it could be completely opaque. It highlights the fine chiseled features of beauties, or obscures the face from the forehead to the neck. It has several forms, but only one name: the veil. Perhaps no other article of clothing has been so over burdened with symbolism through the ages. Today it is commonly associated with Islam.

It may therefore be better to start from scratch, and to interrogate the epithet ‘Chinese design’ and its counterpart, ‘Dutch design’. This questioning is necessary to sensitise ourselves to the inherent contradictions, unwarranted assumptions and nationalism inscribed in notions of ‘Chinese’ or ‘Dutch’ culture, and to actualize their true potential. The starting position should be one of sincere doubt: what is ‘Chinese’ or ‘Dutch’ design, what justifies the use of ‘Chinese’ and ‘Dutch’? Some preliminary observations:

tell us world live write

Today, some non-Muslims use the veil to symbolise women’s oppression in developing countries. Muslim women living in western Europe and North America are beginning to wear the veil – by choice. It demonstrates their modesty and asserts their Muslim identity. Some developing countries have adopted the veil in keeping with their interpretation of dressing modestly. Others have adopted the veil to highlight their differences with their perception of the West.

The typology however fails to address the fundamental question: how can we talk or write about ‘Chinese design’ at all? Talking or writing about China treads on paths ridden with clichés and pitfalls – clichés about China’s ‘long history’ and ‘rich culture’. Causality is often assumed, as if more years of history – imagined or not – add layers of culture. The underlying assumption, that culture is something one can measure, weigh and accumulate, remains just that – an assumption.

The epithets ‘Chinese’, ‘Dutch’, etc, should be confined by quotation marks, to liberate them into the contradictory array of practices, experiences and pasts – which is, after all, what we normally call creativity.

As fundamental political parties gained power in the late 1970s, veiling was again instituted either through social pressure or mandated by law. With Khomeini’s revolution in Iran came the state mandate that women should be veiled. In Pakistan veiling increased as Zia-ul-Haq’s efforts to Islamize Pakistan progressed. One outcome of Taliban-controlled Afghanistan was mandatory veiling.

If we are to define ‘Chinese design’, let me venture a typology: 1. Antique China: objects such as Ming vases, suanzhi furniture and qipao dress; 2. Communist China: paraphernalia from the Cultural Revolution, including the Red Book, Mao icons and the Mao suit; 3. Industrial China: late-modern urban landscapes of Shanghai’s Pudong area, shiny shopping malls and Lenovo laptops; and 4. No-design China: the arguable assertion that contemporary China is a design wasteland.

As nation states gained independence, unveiling was used to symbolise modernity.

Turkey’s Kemal Ataturk probably attacked veiling most vociferously. Shortly after, Iran’s Shah Reza Pahlevi ordered school teachers to unveil. By the 1950s unveiling had taken hold in Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, Jordan and Iraq. In Saudi Arabia, the veil is legally mandatory (but is sometimes of very fine material and nonfunctional as far as concealment goes).

Herzog’s cryptic statement (quoted in Arthur Lubow, ‘The China Syndrome’, New York Times, 21 May 2006) is telling on many counts.

First, it contains a strong us (the implicit West) versus them (the Chinese) logic – as if the two were clearly separate entities. Second, the invocation of tradition rings a banal yet pervasive bell: when it comes to China, references to tradition simply creep in. Third, precisely by positioning China as the cultural other, Herzog allows possibilities for Chinese designers to subvert design practices established and hierarchized in the West. All three – cultural essentialism, the celebration of tradition and possibilities for alternative design practice – need to be critically examined when discussing design prefaced by national/cultural labels such as ‘Chinese’ and ‘Dutch’.

1. One possible answer is the marketing logic of distinction. As much as ‘Italian’, ‘German’ or ‘Japanese’ design provide marketing advantages for certain products, perceived or constructed Chineseness and Dutchness may work wonders. The question then becomes not what is Chineseness or Dutchness, but: what kind of Chineseness or Dutchness sells where?

2. A global economy may demand Chineseness from China, since that is what sells today. Yet, in the long run, the logic of exoticization will only demand newer kinds of exoticness. If Dutch design has succeeded in escaping a global insistence on exotic Dutchness, how will China do so? When and how can we move beyond the cultural epithets and imagine a Chinese-Dutch fusion into cosmopolitan design practice?

3. China today refers to dazzling speed and scale of economic and cultural change, both seemingly absent in the Netherlands. How does this affect design practice?

4. Given the speed and scale of change in China, the question of sustainability is urgent. How to foster design practices sensitive to the environmental implications of consumption and production?

5. Different political, bureaucratic and juridical systems produce their own hindrances and opportunities. Insecurity reigns in China, where approval often depends on guanxi with the right people.

How to navigate such territory, and aren’t differences with the ‘West’ overrated here?

6. The speed and scale of change in China blur distinctions between good and bad, real and fake, as well as other distinctions of taste.

Take its vibrant counterfeiting culture, which cheerfully reproduces and builds on existing designs. The tyranny of the new, the perpetual desire – if not obligation – to produce something original, something radically different, to dominate a global design world, may be replaced by an alternative logic of revamping, a celebration of the fake, practices of refreshing rather than renewing. What can be gained from this alternative logic of cultural production?

As the feminist movement gained ground in Europe and America in the 20th century, many western feminists wanted to empower women in developing countries.

Sometimes their perception of the problems of women in the developing world were at odds with their real lives and concerns. Here the veil was one of the most visual symbols used to represent backward and patriarchal societies.

They are so fresh in mind, they have the most radical things in their tradition, the most amazing faience and perforated jades and scholar’s rocks.

Everyone is encouraged to do their most stupid and extravagant designs there. They don’t have as much of a barrier between good taste and bad taste, between the minimal and expressive. The Beijing stadium tells me that nothing will shock them.

– Jacques Herzog, architect Beijing stadium

introduction

> International law?

The Court lives in the real world.

We must continue to provide that core predictability that distinguishes law from politics, but we have to do so in a way that is responsive to the legitimate needs and aspirations of the international community.

- Rosalyn Higgins, International Court of Justice, 2006

Power and participation in the 21st century

International law

IIAS Newsletter | #41 | Summer 2006

Paper 6, p.2.

Scholarship Series. Berkley Electronic Press,

Criminal Justice’. Yale Law School Student

Courts: Local Empowerment and National

Law 5, p.212.

3. Higonnet, Ethel. 2005. ‘Restructuring Hybrid

pects’. Journal of the History of International

•

If politics is the catalyst for change in law, the horse driving the cart in the 21st century has moved far beyond 17th century Europe. The scope of international law now covers the ‘internal matters’ of states, the actions of individuals and corporations as well as inter-state relations.

NGOs work at the grass-roots level for social justice, lobby governments and international organisations, and call public officials to accountability. One hundred states have ratified the Rome Statute establishing the International Criminal Court, thereby accepting its jurisdiction over war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. Notably

Suzana Dudic works in the prosecutor’s office at the International Criminal Court in The Hague. This introduction is written in her individual capacity. suzanadu@tiscali.cz

International Law: Challenges and Pros-

Ultimately, three of the 11 judges disagreed with the majority judgment and issued separate dissenting opinions.

The most famous – and controversial

The 1689 Treaty of Nerchinsk, which established the boundaries between China and Russia, is an early example of a treaty based on ‘sovereign equality’ that included a non-European state as one of the parties. Many subsequent treaties, however, were anything but equal: the 1842 Treaty of Nanjing and the 1895 Sino-Japanese Treaty of Shimonoseki, to take but two examples, were imposed by force and remain testament to the use and abuse of international law to consolidate the interests of dominant powers. Today, similar

R-J Dupuy, at a 1983 colloquium in The Hague commemorating the 400th anniversary of Hugo Grotius’ birth, when Chinese writings on international law were becoming more widely known, posed the question: ‘Will the emergence on the international scene of cultural systems other than the western which prevailed so far… endanger the future of international law, or, on the contrary, add new currents to it, thus making it richer?’2 The question remains. If international law follows international politics, how can international law be made truly ‘international’? How is it international, and how international is it?

Beyond establishing legal responsibility and preventing impunity, judicial processes are also seen as key to establishing historical truth, enabling post-conflict reconciliation, acknowledging the suffering of victims of crimes and offering them a measure of redress – even decades after the crimes were committed.

Following Nuremberg and Tokyo, as well as the UN-administered criminal tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, several so-called ‘hybrid tribunals’ have been created in an effort to bring the mechanism of justice closer to affected populations in countries that lack institutional capacity to cope with mass crimes. Ethel Higonnet argues that ‘by integrating local norms, hybrid courts can bring culturally adapted justice to the people that international courts purport to serve but cannot reach.’3

Such a tribunal is being established in Cambodia, which will soon begin the trial of Khmer Rouge leaders for Pol Pot-era atrocities. Another is the Serious Crimes Unit in East Timor, which recently concluded efforts to try perpetrators of the violence that followed the 1999 referendum on independence.

The latter had both international and national judges, and drew on international law as well as laws of the UN body administering the country. Under-funding and the failure of Indonesia to extradite senior military officials have, however, hampered the SCU’s work, again underlining the importance of political will to enforce judicial processes.

Recalling the words of ICJ Judge Higgins above, how the ‘legitimate needs and aspirations of the international community’ will be exercised in such cases within the existing structures of national and international legal systems remains unclear. <

of International Law 4, p.159.

Some of the criticism leveled against the Tokyo trial (and possibly a partial explanation for its diminished representation thereafter) focused on legal lacunae.

Defendants were charged with ‘crimes against peace’, which included ‘waging a declared or undeclared war of aggression’, but ‘aggression’ was left undefined. There were no technical rules of evidence, creating inconsistencies in the court’s ad hoc decision-making. Cultural issues also arose, including the familiarity of the Japanese lawyers with the English language and the Anglo-Saxon legal system, and the accuracy of translations. Others were impressed by the irony of justices representing the US, UK, France and the Netherlands finding the defendants guilty of a conspiracy to dominate ‘East Asia, the Western and South Western Pacific Ocean and the Indian Ocean, and certain of the islands in these Oceans.’

•

Many critics contend that international law is not only Eurocentric, but ‘colonial’ and ‘discriminatory’. Students read in textbooks that international law emerged with the 1648 Treaties of Westphalia as a set of rules governing relations among ‘modern’ states in Europe following the Thirty Years’ War. In contrast, the study of non-western legal orders – including those of ancient India and China, which developed systems of mediation, arbitration and customary law – remains largely the preserve of anthropologists, historians and archaeologists. Little is written about traditions and customs of international law from parts of the world that were ‘effectively eclipsed, either de jure by way of colonisation or just de facto, by western dominance,’1 or about how they eventually ‘joined’ the international legal system.

absent from the list of ratifying states, however, are the US and Russia, as well as most Asian countries with the exceptions of the Republic of Korea, Cambodia, Timore-Leste, Mongolia, Tajikistan, Afghanistan and several South Pacific island states.

2. Butkevych, Olga. 2003. ‘History of Ancient

marks the 60th anniversary of what, in its time, was declared ‘the biggest trial in recorded history’.

The International Military Tribunal for the Far East – which tried Japanese military and civilian leaders for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and ‘crimes against peace’ – surpassed the Nuremberg trial in duration (two and a half years), in the number of accused (28), in the number of presiding judges (11), and in the length of its judgment (over 1,200 pages). But compared to Nuremberg, which is widely seen as a watershed moment in international law, Tokyo remains obscure.

charges are leveled at treaties administered by the World Trade Organization, such as the TRIPS agreement on intellectual property rights, which critics argue legitimises the transfer of wealth from developing to developed countries. Others contend that the West uses human rights to impose its own model of intra-state relations that ignores historical and cultural differences.

national Law in Asia’. Journal of the History

2006

– was that of the Indian judge, Radhabinod Pal, who contested the very legitimacy of the trial, which he saw as another example of unequal relations between the West and Asia: ‘When the conduct of the nations is taken into account… perhaps it will be found that only a lost cause is a crime…’

1. Sik, Ko Swan. 2002. ‘Wang Tieya and Inter-

Guest editor

Notes

Suzana Dudic

> International law?

On the eve of the 60th anniversary of the Tokyo trials the symbolic significance of the tribunal should not be underestimated. The very existence of such a court to try such crimes by a panel of international judges has its own moral legacy and has been a beacon to those seeking protection under the rule of law in an effective system of international justice. <

IIAS Newsletter | #41 | Summer 2006

within the jurisdiction of the Court.’

stitutes, at the time it takes place, a crime

Statute unless the conduct in question con-

Liu Daqun is a judge in the Appeals Chamber of the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia.

not be criminally responsible under this

against humanity were respectively classi-

The lasting impact of the Tokyo tribunal lies in its contribution to international jurisprudence. The ICTY, the ICTR and the International Criminal Court have all inherited the legal principles set out in Tokyo and learnt lessons from the court’s shortcomings. The IMTFE contributed to the development of new legal norms and standards of responsibility which advanced international criminal law, developing the notion of individual responsibility, command responsibility, crimes against humanity and crimes against peace, which have since formed the bedrock of international criminal law and the cornerstone of the jurisdiction of the newly-established International Criminal Court.

4. Celebici, Trial Chamber para.377

While the legacy of the IMTFE is reflected in both statute and international

Those who criticize the equity of proceedings fail to note that at Tokyo, the defendants received relatively fair trials compared to those at Nuremberg.

There was no right of appeal to a higher court, but General MacArthur had the power to review and reduce sentences.

Unlike the defendants at Nuremberg, all of the accused at Tokyo had access to both American and Japanese lawyers.

The process was not perfect but the proceedings marked a credible attempt by the international community to try and develop a nascent system of international justice.

A’ offences, while war crimes and crimes

A mixed legacy?

Significantly, a growing Japanese public – including many of its top officials – see Japan as the victim, and not villain, of the postwar trials. This may partially be explained by the crimes committed by the wartime victors (above all the atomic bombs) and their continued impunity.

It may also be attributed to failure to try the emperor – the wartime head of state and commander in chief of the armed forces – and to systematically purge the bureaucracy. Shigemitsu Mamoru, the foreign minister (1943-45) convicted of waging an aggressive war and sentenced to seven years in prison, was paroled in 1950 and went on to serve again as

foreign minister in the Hatoyama cabinet. Japanese generals executed by the IMTFE came to be seen, by some, as patriotic heroes who had fought to liberate Asia from western imperialists.

against peace were classified as a ‘Class

The scope of the ‘command responsibility’ doctrine has recently been examined by the ICTY in the Celebici judgement. Both the Trial and Appeal Chambers took the Tokyo judgements into consideration in reaching their conclusions. The question confronting the court in Celebici was whether command responsibility could only be applied to de jure military commanders or whether the duty could be extended to encompass de facto civilian or political leaders. In its deliberations, the Celebici Trial Chamber recognized that: ‘the International Military Tribunal for the Far East… relied on this principle [of command responsibility] in making findings of guilt against a number of civilian political leaders charged with having deliberately and recklessly disregarded their legal duty to take adequate steps to secure the observance of the laws and customs of war and to prevent their breach.’

jurisprudence, its impact on politics and public memory has been more ambiguous. The crimes that led to the Tokyo trials are in danger of being forgotten.

Approximately 20 million civilians lost their lives to Japanese aggression – more than all military and civilian casualties on all sides in the first world war. While the Tokyo prosecution served the historical purpose of collecting hard documentary evidence of systematic atrocities, the records themselves are incomplete. The trials overlooked the 200,000 ‘comfort women’ who were raped and often murdered by the imperial army. The activities of biological warfare Unit 731 were also never entered into evidence. Arguably the worst of Japanese crimes were kept from the tribunal, and 60 years on the question remains whether justice was done in Tokyo.

from the Nuremberg Trials. At Tokyo, crimes

Justice Pal’s objections to the IMTFE proceedings were ostensibly legal. He concurred with the defense’s contention that the tribunal had no right to try the defendants for crimes against peace and crimes against humanity since these legal categories did not exist prior to 1945. This was, he contended, a violation of the legal principle nullum crimen sine lege, nulla poena sine lege.3 The majority judges maintained that pre-existing treaties – most notably the 1928 Pact of Paris, to which Japan was

The Tokyo tribunal further set a jurisprudential precedent in its definition of command responsibility, which it developed as a concept and a crime.

While judges in Nuremberg were preoccupied with prosecuting commanders who had actively promoted and encouraged the perpetration of atrocities, the justices in Tokyo went further and established individual criminal liability for permitting – as distinct from ordering – atrocities. As a direct result of the Tokyo judgement, the principle of ‘command responsibility’ is now enshrined in the statutes of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), the Special Court for Sierra Leone as well as that of the International Criminal Court.

University Press, p.166.

The decision not to try emperor Hirohito is now generally considered to be one of political expediency. Fear of chaos and the threat of communism almost certainly determined US policy on this point, and it is perhaps with some justification that the other prevailing criticism of the Tokyo trials remains American domination of the whole process.

The facts bear this out: the charter was drafted exclusively by Americans and General MacArthur appointed the judges, while the chief prosecutor, Joseph B. Keenan, was widely regarded as a political nomination. The distinctly American tone of the proceedings has led critics to denounce the trials as a vehicle for American revenge for Pearl Harbor. Another, no less popular interpretation holds that the whole judicial process was a means of assuaging American guilt over the use of atomic bombs. Criticisms of ‘victor’s justice’ have echoed along various proverbial corridors ever since. Prominent among the critics was the judge from India, Justice Pal, who decided from the outset to acquit all of the accused of all charges.

The above controversy notwithstanding, the Tokyo trials left their imprint on subsequent legal thought. Even detractors from the majority judgement such as Judge Röling conceded that the jurisprudence that emerged from the tribunal contributed positively to the development of international criminal law. No defendant after 1945 could credibly answer charges of crimes against humanity with the protestation that it violated the principle of nullum crimen sine lege. The Tokyo trials, together with those at Nuremberg, ensured that crimes against humanity and crimes against peace became embedded in international customary law.

2. In this respect the Tokyo Tribunal differed

Justice and politics

Legacy for international law

Tokyo War Crimes Trial. Princeton: Princeton

The IMTFE’s jurisdiction covered three classes of crimes – conventional war crimes, crimes against humanity, and crimes against peace. Only persons charged with offences which included crimes against peace were actually brought before the tribunal. 2 The accused included four former prime ministers, 11 former ministers, two former ambassadors and eight highranking military officials. The most famous among the accused was Tojo Hideki, acting prime minister during the attack on Pearl Harbor.

The legacy of the IMTFE has often been described as ‘mixed’. This view, however, fails to fully appreciate the historical and legal significance of the tribunal. The Tokyo trials broke the vicious cycle of reprisal and recrimination perpetuated by protracted wars in Asia; the verdict against the defeated enemy was delivered through the due process of law. Justice and not retribution marked the end of the second world war: for the first time in Asia’s history, the perpetrators of international crimes were put in the dock and held to account. With four former prime ministers on trial, the judgement at Tokyo was unequivocal: impunity had no place in the modern world.

1. Minear, R.H. 1973. Victor’s Justice – The

2006 marks the 60th anniversary of the Tokyo war crimes trials. On 3 May 1946, the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE) opened its case against 28 Class A Japanese defendants.

General Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers in Japan, described the trials as ‘epochal’ – the proceedings were designed to do nothing less than ‘formulate and codify standards of international morality.’1

From Tokyo to The Hague

a signatory – outlawed war as an instrument of public policy.

Notes

Liu Daqun

22(1) which stipulates that: ‘A person shall

place in the modern world.

law’ is enshrined in the ICC Statute in Article

Tokyo was unequivocal: impunity had no

and no punishment without a (pre-existing)

prime ministers on trial, the judgement at

From Tokyo to The Hague

fied as ‘Class B’ and ‘Class C’ offences.

of the second world war. With four former

3. The principle that there can be ‘No crime

Justice and not retribution marked the end

> International law?

Can corporations be held legally responsible for

human rights serious

violations?

Ilaria Bottigliero

Yes, according to two landmark decisions of 2006. In January, the

Breakthrough decisions

High Court of South Korea ordered Dow Chemical and Monsanto,

A 26 January 2006 High Court ruling in South Korea held, for the first time, that Dow Chemical and Monsanto had manufactured chemical agents containing dioxin that exceeded legally permitted levels, and had caused longterm damage to the health of persons exposed to them. In their defense, the two American companies argued that the US government should be responsible for any damages, on the grounds that it – and not they – decided how, when and where to use the chemical defoliants. The court, however, rejected the defendants’ arguments and ordered Dow Chemical and Monsanto to pay US$85 million in medical compensation. The money will be distributed between 6,800 South Korean former troops exposed to the agent between 1965 and 1973, who were among the 320,000 troops South Korea sent to Vietnam – the largest foreign contingent to fight alongside the US in the conflict. The beneficiaries are to receive compensation ranging from US$6,180 - $47,400. Dow Chemical and Monsanto announced their intention to appeal the decision.

The decision was a major success for victims of Agent Orange. Prior to this judgment, some 20,000 South Korean veterans had filed a series of unsuccessful lawsuits before South Korean courts against manufacturing companies including Monsanto, Dow Chemical and Hercules Incorporated, while a US federal court had dismissed the legal action of Vietnamese plaintiffs in March 2005. But while Asian victims of Agent Orange were not successful until 2006, American Vietnam War Veterans had already reached a US$180 million out-of-court settlement with manufacturers, including Monsanto and Dow Chemical, in 1984.

US producers of Agent Orange used during the Vietnam War, to compensate South Korean troops affected by the agents. In June, a French court ordered both the French government and the state railway company SNCF to compensate two families of Jews deported during the Nazi occupation. Will these rulings have any effect on similar cases pending elsewhere? How might they affect law governing the responsibility of non-state actors for crimes under international law?

The June 2006 ruling by a French court found both the French government and the state railway company Société Nationale Chemins de Fer (SNCF) to have been accomplices in crimes against humanity for their role during the Nazi occupation. Relatives of the two plaintiffs had been taken by SNCF trains to a transit camp in Drancy, near Paris. From this transit camp, known as the ‘antechamber of death’, an estimated 70,000 French Jews were transported to death camps in Germany. The court found that the government’s allowing of state railways to transport the Jews to the transit camp was an ‘act of negligence of the state’s responsibilities’ as the government must have known that death camps were the final destination. For its part, SNCF was found liable as a corporation for never having raised objections to transporting these individuals. The court ordered the French government and SNCF to pay €62,000 to the two families of the deported Jews.

As in the Agent Orange case in South Korea, survivors and families of victims had long fought for redress from SNCF

IIAS Newsletter | #41 | Summer 2006

in French civil courts. Prior to the June 2006 ruling, courts had consistently rejected victims’ claims on grounds which echoed the defence’s argument: SNCF had been commandeered by Nazi forces and the railway company had had to co-operate under duress. For this it could not be held responsible. The June 2006 judgment, however, recognized the legal liability of both the French government and SNCF based on the plaintiffs’ argument that involvement in the deportation process went far beyond what the Nazis requested. Victims’ relatives pointed out, for instance, that SNCF continued billing the French government for the transfers even after France was liberated by the Allies. SNCF announced its plans to appeal the decision.

These events highlight how the full realisation of victims’ right to redress, even when it involves the liability of non-state actors, depends on political will to fully recognise past violations and to move forward in redressing wrongs. The 2006 judgment in France followed government efforts to officially recognise its responsibility for acts committed during the Nazi occupation, including President Chirac’s acknowl-

edgment in 1996 of the French government’s responsibility for crimes against humanity committed during the Vichy regime.

Hope for the future?

These two key decisions on the liability of non-state actors for serious human rights violations raise a number of important questions. First, will these decisions have any positive effect on similar cases currently pending before domestic courts, for example, those of the comfort women of Southeast Asia or the victims of Germ Warfare Unit 731? Second, how will these decisions affect law governing the responsibility of non-state actors for crimes under international law more generally?

Third, should the companies not abide by the judgments, will victims ever be able to get hold of the compensation money?

As for the first question, a number of high-profile cases involving instances of war crimes allegedly perpetrated

by Japanese troops during the second world war have long been pending before Japanese domestic courts. In these cases, large numbers of victims,

mostly of Chinese nationality, but also, as in the case of the comfort women, of various East Asian nationalities, filed class action suits against the Japanese government for sexual slavery, torture, human experiments and violations of the laws and customs of war more generally. So far, the Japanese government has refused to admit any legal responsibility for the suffering of victims, consistently arguing that all compensation claims were settled by the 1951 San Francisco Peace Treaty.

Given the Japanese government’s position on this issue, can victims reasonably hope Japanese courts will follow the example set by the courts in the recent Korean and French decisions?

The first element one needs to consider is that, unlike the Korean case and to some extent, the French case discussed above, in most of the cases pending against Japan, victims have been seeking remedies for damages attributable to the state, rather than to non-state actors. This means that the South Korean and French judgments are likely to be only partially relevant to those cases involving state responsibility. The South Korean and French cases, however, at least seem to reflect greater international recognition of victims’ rights in judicial fora, including the right to receive adequate compensation. Therefore, should the government of Japan, or other governments implicated in serious human rights violations elsewhere, decide to unequivocally acknowledge responsibility (perhaps even issuing official apologies to victims), courts might follow up with some form of judicial recognition such as compensation awards, even where this could involve re-opening the issue of state liability for violations.

Looking at the question from a different angle, victims’ lawsuits brought against continued on page 8

>

> International law?

Civil society and the search for justice:

the Tokyo women’s tribunal

What can international civil society do to further justice for victims and survivors of war crimes and crimes against humanity in cases where perpetrators will never be brought to trial? Is it time to look beyond official state and international organs?

Initiatives from civil society can return dignity to survivors, empower ordinary people, educate the public and create lasting records where official justice has been denied.

Tina Dolgopol

T

hose working on the issue of sexual slavery committed by the Japanese military during the second world war have long been stunned by the failure of the international community to bring to trial those responsible for creating and implementing the ‘comfort women’ system. International norms – both treaty and customary law1 – concerning war crimes, crimes against humanity, slavery and the trafficking in women and children were applicable, and could have been used to charge relevant military and government officials. For many of the women it has been a source of enduring pain and frustration that no criminal sanctions were ever imposed for the violations of their rights.

As it became increasingly obvious that the government of Japan would neither accept responsibility to fully and frankly disclose the involvement of military and government officials, nor apologise and offer reparations to the women, members of civil society decided to find a mechanism that would offer the women ‘justice’. The groups working with the women were aware that more-than-strictly-legal justice was necessary. Although not articulated in these terms, implicit in their work is the recognition that justice is multifaceted – including the restoration of dignity and public acknowledgement of the harm inflicted.

Organising from the grassroots The Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal for the Trial of Japanese Military Sexual Slavery (hereafter the Tokyo Women’s Tribunal), held in Tokyo 8-10 December 2000, was the result of the combined hard work of NGOs, surviving ‘comfort women’ and committed individuals. Its main organizers – the Korean Council for Women Drafted into Military Sexual Slavery, the Asian Centre for Women’s Human Rights (ASCENT), and the Violence Against Women in War Network (VAWW-NET Japan) – contacted individuals and groups throughout the Asia-Pacific region to ensure the widest possible representation. Teams of researchers from China, Indonesia, Japan, North Korea, South Korea, Taiwan and the Philippines worked tirelessly over a two-year period to gather

the evidence to be placed before the tribunal.

The need for an overarching legal framework was recognised early on.

Two chief prosecutors, neither of them from a victimized country, were appointed. Four judges, individuals recognised internationally for their integrity and commitment to human rights and who had the requisite legal expertise, were selected to hear the evidence. During the preparations for the tribunal, the country teams and the chief prosecutors decided to rely on law that was in force in 1946. This was done to emphasise that the crimes could have been tried during the proceedings of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East.2 More than 75 survivors were present at the proceedings. Although some took to the witness stand to give evidence, many of the personal testimonies were recorded on video so the women would not have to recount the horrific details of their experiences before an audience of some 1,500 people.

The women whose testimonies were videotaped were present at the tribunal; they swore an oath affirming the truth of their statements. The tribunal also took evidence from a number of expert witnesses on the organisation of the Japanese military; documents concerning the comfort system found in government archives; the structure of the wartime government including powers exercised by the emperor; the incidence and effect of trauma on victims of mass rape; and the applicable rules of international law applying at the close of the second world war.

The national prosecution teams and the two chief prosecutors introduced several hundred pages of documentary evidence; two former Japanese soldiers agreed to tell of their involvement in, and experiences of, the ‘comfort women system’.

Learning from the judgement The Tokyo Women’s Tribunal made a significant contribution to the development of international law. It resulted in the compilation of a vast body of historical material and culminated in a judgement of over 200 pages that offers an excellent analysis of the development of international humanitarian law over the past 50 years.

In addition to setting out in vivid detail the devastating effects that confinement within the ‘comfort system’ had on women throughout the Asia-Pacific region, the judgement contains an overview of the development of the concept of crimes against humanity and the pre-Nuremberg and Tokyo precedents for considering rape as such a crime. It also analyses the handling of sex crimes by both the Nuremberg and Tokyo Tribunals. Furthermore, the judgement adopts and develops the concept of sexual slavery in accordance with the ideas emerging from the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), in order to demonstrate that the definition given to the term ‘slavery’ within the Elements of Crimes annex in the statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC) is overly narrow.

Essentially, the ICC’s Elements of Crimes focuses on the use of the person in a commercial exchange whereas the ICTY’s judgement in Kunarac focuses on the status or condition of the person being enslaved. This distinction is crucial to victims. For them, the essence of being enslaved is the loss of control over their bodies. Slavery is an affront to human dignity precisely because it denies a person one of the essential elements of personhood: autonomy. To focus on the gain of the perpetrator is to overlook the very nature of the crime. It is to be hoped that the prosecutors and judges of the International Criminal Court will exercise due discretion when applying this particular article, and will look to general principles of international law when considering acts that fall within sexual slavery.

The Tokyo Women’s Tribunal judgement may also prove useful for those wishing to influence the work of the Victim’s Trust Fund set up under the Rome Statute. The latter draws from monies the International Criminal Court has ordered offenders to pay as well as voluntary donations; payments can be made directly to victims or to recognised organisations such as those administering humanitarian aid. In the past, reparations were based on the assumption that those affected by crimes – survivors and the families of victims – had suffered a specific harm rather than one with ongoing, long-term consequences. The Tokyo Women’s Tribunal judgement has highlighted the necessity of con-

IIAS Newsletter | #41 | Summer 2006

continued on page 9

>

> International law? continued from page 6

>

companies can pressure governments to take more concrete steps to compensate victims, for example, through the establishment of state-sponsored trust funds.

Germany established a joint US-German trust fund in 2000 to compensate victims of slave labour during the Nazi regime, under the pressure of some 55 class actions brought against German firms in US courts. In this instance, half of the US$4.8 billion fund for the compensation of some 900,000 victims was financed by some 3,000 German companies.

Whether these recent judicial developments will advance the law on nonstate liability for international crimes needs to be addressed in relation to the evolution of victims’ rights both internationally and domestically. Attempts to determine the international liability of non-state actors for international crimes are not new. Courts have often established that a non-state actor, such as an individual, or even a company or a corporation, can be held responsible

for serious human rights violations. In March 2000, a South Korean plaintiff received ¥4.1 million in compensation from a Japanese steel company, NKK, for slave labour during the second world war.

Individuals in the United States over the past decade have begun to sue companies for human rights violations with various degrees of success invoking the Alien Tort Claims Act (ATCA). In 1996, Burmese villagers filed a lawsuit in US courts against the oil company UNOCAL for acts of torture, rape, forced labour, and forced relocation committed in Myanmar in connection with the construction of an oil pipeline. Initially, a federal district court in California rejected UNOCAL’s motions to dismiss the case, ruling that the company could be held liable under the ATCA. A further judgment by the district court ultimately dismissed the case on the grounds that the government, rather than corporation agents, had committed the alleged violations. Irrespective of

the final outcome, all of these attempts at establishing corporate and individual liability for serious human rights violations form part of a growing practice establishing that first, non-state actors can be sued successfully, and second, that they can be held liable and ordered to pay compensation to the victims.

A question of enforcement As evidenced in a number of cases, there seems to be a growing recognition of victims’ rights, both on the part of political players and the courts. Ironically, the real difficulties for victims often arise when they succeed in getting an award for compensation. The enforcement of compensation judgments against nonstate actors, especially foreign individuals or companies, has always been a weak link in victims’ access to justice. There have been countless cases where victims were awarded huge exemplary compensation awards, but could never retrieve the actual money from the tortfeasor’s assets. This weakness has been especially evident in the history of serious human

rights violations litigated in US courts under the ATCA. In the famous 1984 Filártiga v. Peña-Irala case, the courts awarded damages of more than US$10 million, but the complainants to date have not been successful in enforcing the judgment in Paraguay because the assets, apparently, are located abroad. Similarly, in the Marcos Litigation – another highprofile case before US courts – Filipino victims of human rights abuses during the Marcos regime filed a class action against the Marcos estate. In 1995, the court awarded damages for around US$2 billion, but more than ten years later the money remains in the hands of the Philippine government. Victims are currently trying to enforce the judgment in the Philippine courts.

The next step towards the effective realisation of victims’ basic right to redress is the prompt enforcement of reparation orders. In the Korean case against the manufacturers of Agent Orange, neither Monsanto nor Dow Chemical seem to own registered property in Korea. Ulti-

mately, whether victims actually receive the compensation they won in the courts will likely depend upon the responsibility of Dow Chemical, Monsanto or SNCF to honour their legal obligations. If corporations fail to pay compensation as the courts have ordered, the likelihood that victims actually get their money will depend upon the degree of inter-state co-operation in ensuring the judgments are enforced. < Ilaria Bottigliero (PhD, Graduate Institute of International Studies, Geneva) is Lecturer at the Lund University Faculty of Law and at the Raoul Wallenberg Institute of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law. She is the author of Redress for Victims of Crimes under International Law and 120 Million Landmines Deployed Worldwide: Fact or Fiction? as well as several scholarly articles on victims’ reparations, women’s rights and international criminal justice. She has lectured extensively in Europe and Asia. ilaria.bottigliero@rwi.lu.se

Human rights

between Europe and Southeast Asia Human rights are a source of friction between Southeast Asian and European governments. Southeast Asian politicians generally emphasise principles of sovereignty and non-interference in internal matters, while their European counterparts tend to champion democracy, human rights and good governance beyond their borders. The differences in approach, however, do not seem as daunting today as they once did.

S i m o n e Ey s i n k

R

elations between Europe and East Asia have been institutionalised since 1996 in the Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM), a forum for dialogue between heads of state established by the then 15 member states of the European Union, the seven member states of the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN), China, Japan and the Republic of Korea. ASEM is informal, without official institutions or a secretariat; its main aim is to build trust among its members and to create a framework for future co-operation.

The first ASEM summit in 1996 addressed general aspirations, trade and investment; it was considered a success as it avoided controversial issues.

The second summit in 1998 was more problematic – ASEAN had expanded the previous year and now included Vietnam, Cambodia and Myanmar; human rights violations by Myanmar’s military government became a particular source of friction between the European and Asian sides. EU member states, consistent with their policy of an arms embargo and economic sanctions against Myanmar, were unwilling to accept it as a participant. In contrast, most Asian states considered Myanmar’s political instability and human rights record an internal matter that should not interfere with its partici

IIAS Newsletter | #41 | Summer 2006

pation in multi-lateral meetings or its membership of ASEAN: silent diplomacy and ‘constructive engagement’ were the way forward. This difference in approach almost derailed the ASEM project: meetings between senior officials and ministers were cancelled, and the summit only went ahead at the last moment due to Thai mediation.

Only seven of the ten ASEAN countries attended the second, third and fourth summits in 1998, 2000 and 2002.

Myanmar’s participation became an issue again before the fifth ASEM summit in 2004 as the ten new states of the enlarged European Union were automatically accepted. A compromise was reached where Myanmar could attend, but not at the presidential level. This solution, considered far from ideal by many, is again causing trouble in the run up to the sixth summit in Helsinki this November.

EU, ASEAN and the ‘Asian way’ The controversy over Myanmar’s participation within ASEM points to deeper differences in opinion regarding state sovereignty, regional co-operation and the realization of national society between – generally speaking – ASEM’s European and Asian member states.

The historical context is crucial. The European states, after a 20th century of unprecedented carnage and human

rights abuses, have transferred some of their law-making powers to a supranational organization that legislates on human rights standards. ASEAN, in contrast, was set up in 1967 by states varying enormously in politics, economy and culture. What they shared was their recently won post-colonial status and the priority of nation-building.

ASEAN, far from being an ambitious project for regional co-operation, was a cautious attempt to maintain friendly relations between states. The association was based on the non-binding Bangkok Declaration, where the principle of noninterference in internal matters, or state sovereignty, was considered the cornerstone for co-operation.

Southeast Asian states’ greater emphasis on national sovereignty is reflected in their approach to conceptualising and implementing human rights.

The focus has been on protection by the states themselves, according to their own ‘cultural’ norms. Critics of this approach have accused certain Southeast Asian leaders of misusing the argument of cultural differences and sovereignty to hide rights-violating behaviour. Former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, a prominent advocate of ‘Asian values’, proclaimed that human rights privileged ‘western values’ – most notably individual freedom – and was not suitable for Asia where commu-

> International law? >

Publishing 2000) pp.352-353.

Legal Thought at the Turn of the Century (Hart

Douzinas, The End of Human Rights: Critical

womenstribunal2000/judgement.html

3. Emmanuel Levinas as quoted in Costas

www1.jca.apc.org/vaww-net-japan/english/

Women in War Network - Japan website:

from the website of the Violence Against

83. A copy of the judgement can be obtained

The Hague, December 2001, paragraphs 81-

Japanese Military Sexual Slavery delivered in

Tina Dolgopol is a senior lecturer in law at the School of Law, Flinders University, Australia. She was one of the two chief prosecutors at the Tokyo Women’s Tribunal. tina.dolgopol@flinders.edu.au

al War Crimes Tribunal 2000 for the Trial of

Court of Justice (ICJ The Hague 2004).

women during armed conflict has been enriched by their courage in coming forward to tell their stories. <

2. See Judgement of the Women’s Internation-

For further information see The International

and customary law obligations can co-exist.

their international legal obligations. Treaty

‘Justice means constant revision of justice, expectation of a better justice.’3 Through the efforts of civil society,

to undertake a particular course of action by

We cannot assume that the ‘comfort women’ will be the last group of survivors to feel this way. This leads to two fundamental questions. What obligation does the international community have

surviving comfort women have been accorded a form of justice. They have been empowered by their participation in the tribunal, and this in turn has enabled them to regain a sense of their dignity and worth. Civil society has ensured that the experiences of victims and survivors will not be forgotten; our understanding of the experiences of

states act out of a belief that they are required

The efforts of international civil society in organising and bringing the Tokyo Women’s Tribunal to fruition challenges the adequacy of the international community’s response to the needs and rights of victims and survivors following mass atrocities. The tribunal poses a heretofore unasked but important question: what should the international community do to acknowledge the suffering of victims and survivors of war crimes and crimes against humanity in cases where the perpetrators will never be brought to trial? The inevitable limi-

The evidence placed before the tribunal demonstrated that the years of silence that surrounded the issue of the ‘comfort system’ left the women affected by that system wondering about their value as human beings.

They had to live with the physical and psychological damage, while knowing that no one had ever been held accountable for what had happened to them. Whatever dignity has now been restored cannot take away from the years of shame, fear and regret that they have had to endure alone.

to those without access to mechanisms that will provide them with ‘justice’?

And, if we continue to do nothing, are we complicit in the continuing harm that will be experienced by the survivors? Perhaps it is time to look beyond official state and international organs for means of achieving justice, particularly in the documentation of events and the acknowledgement of victims and survivors. It may be that the significance of the Tokyo Women’s Tribunal will be the message it sends to others that something can be done by ordinary people to encourage the healing of victims and to create lasting historical records of previously overlooked history. Having the entire set of documents placed before the tribunal digitized will allow scholars and other interested individuals to study, not only the comfort women system, but the birth and work of an international movement to further women’s rights.

fied them. Customary norms are formed when

A broader justice

tation of resources will mean that not all crimes within the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court will in fact be brought to trial. Many countries lack the resources to conduct either trials or truth commissions.

1. Treaties bind those countries that have rati-

sidering survivors’ long-term needs, and may encourage the ICC Victim’s Trust Fund to think carefully and creatively about the types of services that need to be supported and nurtured. It also may persuade the Fund to assist research partnerships between NGOs and academics focusing on the efficacy of particular services and the manner in which the long-term needs of survivors can be addressed.

Notes

continued from page 7

Illustrated by Chiara Dissette

and politically empowered middle class in Europe did not emerge overnight.

Improvement in the protection of human rights in Southeast Asia will result from dynamics within the region itself, which will lead to a more sustainable and effective result than when lectured to by foreign (former colonial) powers. Respecting the Southeast Asian states and their way of dealing with issues is the right thing to do – without trying to control everything, the way we are used to. <

Lumpur, 20-22 June 1997.

ASEAN Human Rights Mechanism: Kuala

the Workshop for the Establishment of an

Simone Eysink Clingendael Netherlands Institute for International Relations seysink@clingendael.nl

3. Conclusions and Recommendations of

12 December 2005, paragraph 4.

ment of the ASEAN Charter. Kuala Lumpur,

Human rights remain controversial in relations between Europe and Southeast Asia; fundamental differences of opinion remain on implementing ‘universal’ human rights within specific national contexts. How to deal with human rights violating states such as Myanmar remains a challenge for Southeast Asian governments. Should Myanmar’s military government remain included in the system of regional co-operation, or should it be more openly criticised?

Although ASEAN states still officially

2. Kuala Lumpur Declaration on the Establish-

Future challenges

english/bodies/docs/RatificationStatus.pdf

The road ahead will be gradual and delicate. European partners need to acknowledge recent developments in Southeast Asia, and to encourage them rather than trying to speed things up through criticism and pressure. Europe needs to realize that its particular practice of democracy cannot be transplanted root and branch to Southeast Asia. The European states are now more homogenous in political stability and economic development than their Southeast Asian counterparts; the large

Rights Treaties. 10 April 2006. www.ohchr.org/

The greater institutionalisation of regional co-operation will likely further the protection of human rights in Southeast Asia. An ‘Eminent Persons Group’ is currently drafting recommendations for a legally binding ASEAN Charter.

The Charter – which will endorse democratic institutions, human rights, transparency and good governance2 – has yet to be finalised, but it could be a significant step towards the regional human rights treaty that ASEAN member states have been working on for some time.3 An analogy is the inter-American system of human rights protection, where the Charter of the Organisation of American States became the basis for the American Convention on Human Rights of 1969.

maintain that the situation in Myanmar is an internal matter, under the surface there is growing impatience and more direct criticism; some argue that Myanmar has become a threat to regional stability.

tions of the Principal International Human

Civil society in Southeast Asia is active in promoting human rights. The Asian Commission on Human Rights, which drafted the ‘Asian Human Rights Charter – a Peoples’ Charter’ in the 1990s, is one important initiative. ForumAsia, a network of Asian human rights organisations that promotes, protects, educates and monitors all categories of human rights, is another. Also of note is the Asia-Europe Peoples’ Forum, which takes place within the ASEM context.

This platform for over 400 Asian and European NGOs is campaigning for inclusion in the ASEM Dialogue, where it wants to see discussion of democratisation. The existence of these groups points to a cautious but discernible trend towards more open discussion of

state affairs by NGOs, academics and business communities.

sioner for Human Rights, Status of Ratifica-

Southeast Asia over the past five-six years has witnessed a deepening transition towards democratic practices and respect for citizens’ rights. Leaders today are less inclined to invoke cultural relativism when discussing issues around human rights and their implementation. In the wake of the 199798 financial crisis, Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia (re-)established national human rights commissions. In 2005 and 2006, Indonesia ratified both Covenants on Civil and Political Rights and Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, while Thailand signed the two Protocols of the Rights of the Child.1

1. Office of the United Nations High Commis-

While the argument of ‘Asian values’ has been misused by political leaders to serve political interests, it remains plausible that Asian governments have different priorities from western ones – on individual versus community rights, and civil versus social rights. This is born out by the ratification pattern of human rights treaties

by European and Asian states. The former favour agreements that apply to individuals based on the Universal Declaration on Human Rights and both Covenants; many Asian states, on the other hand, show a priority for first protecting vulnerable groups such as women and children. All ASEAN member states, with the exception of Brunei Darussalam, are party to the UN Convention for Women (CEDAW) and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC).

Recent developments

Notes

nity, order and harmony were more important. Individual rights should thus be sacrificed to serve wider community interests and national economic development. Such statements, and the fact that until two years ago only five out of ten ASEAN member states had ratified both Covenants on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), led observers to doubt the seriousness of Southeast Asian governments’ commitment to human rights in any form.

IIAS Newsletter | #41 | Summer 2006

> Research continued from page 1

>

More remarkable still, the remains of nine other individuals indicated that Homo floresiensis had been living on Flores until just 12,000-13,000 years ago. Although we do not have certain evidence for the presence of Homo sapiens on Flores at that time – which in geological terms is virtually the present – we do know that by 13,000 BP, modern humans had long been living in Indonesia. Thus, there is a strong possibility – some would say a virtual certainty – that Homo floresiensis and the ancestors of modern Florenese actually met one another. This leads directly to another astonishing feature of the palaeanthropological story. Some members of the research team that made the discovery, as well as other scientific commentators, suggested that Homo floresiensis might have survived on Flores until much more recently, and that direct descendants of the little hominids might even survive to the present. What is more, the suggestion was made that Homo floresiensis might be one and the same as the creature called ebu gogo, the wildman of Nage, whom I had described in several pages of a book on Nage cosmology published in 1998.

Also casting doubt on the zoological reality of wildman figures is what might be called the ‘weakest link’ argument. This is the idea that if one instance of a reputed phenomenon can be shown to lack empirical foundation, then chances are that other instances, and possibly all of them, are similarly without substance. But as remarkable as the similarities between images of wildmen encountered in different parts of the world may be, there is nevertheless another side to this apparently universal coin. For a closer look at the images reveals that they are in fact rather diverse. Recently, I have been reviewing a series of physical and behavioural features attributed to nearly two dozen wildman categories from around the world. The results so far suggest that all they have in common is a generally humanlike (or higher primate) form, more or less erect posture, bipedalism, and a more or less hairy body. Diversity is revealed in size and general degree of human-like appearance. While some local hominoids are decidedly larger than humans, many others – like the Florenese ebu gogo and the Sumatran ‘short man’ or orang pendek – are smaller than local Homo sapiens. In addition, whereas some wildmen appear decidedly human – for example, they may be attributed with some form of speech or the use of fire – others seem far more like some sort of ape.

What this amounted to, then, was a claim that wildman categories like ebu gogo might reflect local human experience of a non-sapiens hominid encountered some thousands, or perhaps just hundreds, of years ago. By the same token, the claim was made that the type of skeleton of Homo floresiensis might represent our first physical evidence of a real, living wildman. Such suggestions should of course be treated with caution. Nevertheless, I do not believe that they can simply be dismissed as outlandish. Rather, they should be considered dispassionately as well as critically, and, moreover, with a view to reassessing the anthropological orthodoxy which immediately classifies categories like the wildman as no more than socially and cultural constructed fantasies. To do so, however, requires a thorough investigation of wildman images not just in eastern Indonesia but elsewhere in Southeast Asia and indeed the world over.

Another kind of diversity concerns the biogeographical plausibility of wildman images. Simply stated, while some of the creatures appear extremely unlikely (even impossible) in ecological and evolutionary terms, from the same perspectives others are not quite so improbable. An example of the highly unlikely variety is the North American sasquatch, particularly in view of the evident absence of primates in the New World (other than South and Central American monkeys). In contrast, an ‘ape-man’ in Sumatra, the home of siamangs, gibbons, and orang-utans, is rather more credible, especially in relation to the possibility that the local category – and here I refer to the aforementioned orang pendek – might in fact reflect a hitherto unconfirmed or undiscovered species or variety of ape (as suggested by such primatologists as Herman Rijksen and David Chivers). Even if one accepts that some, perhaps the majority, of wildman representations are empirically unfounded, this does not mean that all of them are. And if biogeographical plausibility differs from case to case, then the possibilities of explanation must vary as well.

The wildman as a cognitive universal As I employ the term, ‘wildman’ refers to creatures more humanlike than any known ape. They are usually bipedal, sometimes attributed with a rudimentary technology and even a language. Expressed another way, if great apes are apes, then wildmen are rather more like ‘ape-men’. In as much as apes are conceived as (non-human) animals, the wildman representation concerns creatures intermediate between animals and humans. This raises the complex issue of the distinction between humans and animals and how the contrast is conceived cross-culturally. The category of the wildman, wherever it occurs, presupposes a distinction between humans and non-humans which the creature in question appears to confuse.

This brings us back to the wildman’s apparent universality.

Even if an image – in this case a hairy manlike creature – suggests a natural proclivity of human thought, and is evidently quite fantastic in some of the contexts in which it occurs, this does not preclude certain instances from coinciding with something empirical. To cite the most obvious example: European folk possessed representations of hominoidal creatures corresponding to great apes well before the proponents of an emerging European science ‘discovered’ orang-utans and chimpanzees in the 17th century. It could be argued that ‘prescientific’ European images of wildmen are, ultimately and indirectly, derived from some ancient but unsustained experience of non-human primates. This is certainly an interesting possibility, but it would be difficult to prove. The point is simply that representations with different epistemological roots (such as ape-like creatures posited in northern North America on the one hand, and in Borneo and West Africa on the other) can resemble one another closely. By the same token, it is arguable that western scholars would still be sceptical about the existence of orang-utans, for example, had Europeans not documented the apes’ existence just three centuries ago.

Throughout the world, images of the wildman depict a being covered in hair. Particularly in Southeast Asia – but to a surprising degree elsewhere as well – wildmen are also described as small, or smaller than local humans. (Even the Himalayan yeti, often misleadingly called the ‘abominable snowman’, is sometimes conceived as a creature just over a metre in height).

Both of these attributes – hairiness and small size – are significant. While some wildmen are reputedly larger than human beings, the attribution of extensive body hair serves to distinguish the wildman from a host of smooth-skinned beings – sprites, elves, dwarfs, leprechauns – which are similarly diminutive but otherwise quite different in physical appearance and reputed powers and abilities from hairy hominoids like the Florenese ebu gogo.

Features commonly attributed to the wildman point to a universal figure, and indeed variants of the image seem to pop up almost everywhere. In Indonesia, they occur not just in Flores and Sumba, but in southern and northern Sumatra, in Borneo, Sulawesi, and Sumbawa. On the Southeast Asian mainland, similar hairy hominoids are reputedly encountered in Thailand, Vietnam, Laos and the Malay Peninsula. Further afield, the Chinese have their wildman (usually named yeren), reported in several mountainous regions of that vast country, while the Himalayas is of course home to the yeti. Less well known are comparable figures from Central Asia and Sri Lanka. (Described in a series of publications appearing in the 19th and early 20th century, the Sri Lankan creatures are known as nittaewo and bear an interesting resemblance to the Florenese ebu gogo insofar as they, also, were reputedly rendered extinct by human neighbours just a few hundred years ago, and in much the same way.) Outside of Asia, wildman images occur in several parts of Africa, Oceania, Australia and the New World. Finally, one should not forget the European 10

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wildman, a figure of late mediaeval literature and iconography, who as the art historian Richard Bernheimer demonstrated some fifty years ago, is rooted in an earlier and ultimately pre-Christian folk image.

Gibson, Walter M.1856, The Prison of Weltevreden; and a Glance at the East Indian Archipelago. London : Sampson Low, Son, and Co. New

Since the image is found in so many places, periods and cultures, it is difficult to see how the wildman could be explained as a function of particular cosmologies, social systems or historical experiences. One is therefore inclined to view the figure as something ‘non-cultural’, or ‘pan-cultural’, a cognitive universal or archetype of the human imagination. This, of course, poses problems for those who would reduce the wildman to a cultural or ideological artefact. Yet it is equally problematic for the thesis that wildmen might reflect something empirical or substantially zoological. In other words, if human imagination is inclined to conjure up wildmen anywhere, then it might seem unnecessary to consider the possibility of real creatures existing in the wild.

York : Riker

Another demonstration of how the widespread image of the wildman does not preclude subsequent concordance with empirical creatures is found in striking similarities between wildmen and palaeoanthropological models of ancient hominids. According to Stoczkowski, the resemblance reflects an implicit yet continuing influence of the European figure on modern anthropological science. In this regard, however, Stoczkowski refers more to behavioural and cultural (including technological) aspects of palaeoanthropological theorizing. He does not, so far as I can tell, deny that fossil remains of pre-sapiens hominids indicate physical resemblance to representations of the European wildman in regard, for example, to morphologically primitive cranial features or a robust frame. The hairy bodies regularly attributed to Homo erectus, neanderthalensis and all the rest are another matter, since we simply do not know when or how, or for that matter why, members of the genus Homo became largely smooth-bodied.

Thus the hairiness of reconstructions of Homo erectus, for example, really could reflect older European representations of wildmen. On the other hand, in view of the hairiness of all non-human primates, it is a fair inference that some of our

> Research ancestors were hairier than we are. The resemblance between reconstructions of non-sapiens members of the genus Homo – including, of course, Homo floresiensis – and the wildman therefore remains a puzzle. And, since I have largely been referring to the European wildman, I should mention that non-European exemplars, including such putative Southeast Asian hominoids as the Nage ebu gogo, sound even more like palaeoanthropological reconstructions than does the European variety.

no further than attributing hairy bodies and ape-like features to the target group. For once one starts crediting them with tails or horns, for example, one is dealing with a rather different representation. To take this point no further, I would just mention that in my investigations of the Nage category ebu gogo, I have found little evidence for these putative hairy hominoids reflecting, for example, an aboriginal or phenotypically distinct population once inhabiting the Nage region. I still do not rule this out as an explanation. In fact, in western Flores (the region in which Homo floresiensis was discovered), earlier populations identified by name are mentioned in the myths of currently dominant groups, where they are described as coarse, hairy and as having initially lacked fire and other technology. But no such aboriginal groups, named or unnamed, are identified in Nage mythology.

Cultural and sociological approaches If some features of wildman images seem quite plausible, especially insofar as they coincide with features of attested species, the same images nevertheless incorporate other features, both physical and behavioural, which appear much less credible, indeed quite fantastic. One example is the inverted feet attributed by local Sumatrans to the orang pendek. Another is pendulous breasts so long that they can be tossed over the shoulder, a feature ascribed to the Flores ebu gogo, the mili mongga of Sumba and also, interestingly enough, to the wildman of Europe. By the same token, some fantastic attributes of wildmen, in Southeast Asia and elsewhere, are further ascribed to spirits (as are the two just cited as examples).

Similar criticisms can be made of a basically functionalist approach that construes the wildman as a model of uncultured, disorderly humanity, and as an allegorical device affirming the value of social order. In the Nage case, I am thinking of the narrative portrayal of ebu gogo as possible child abductors, but more definitely as cultureless crop raiders who eventually met their end as a direct result of their thieving habits. Again, there are many ways for a community to make this moral point. Also, the lesson does not require a villain with the specific physical form of ebu gogo. The view of the wildman as an imaginary construct serving to promote certain social ends, while somewhat credible, therefore leaves several questions unanswered.

In social or cultural anthropology, the time-honoured approach has been to explain seemingly fantastic images as symbolic expressions or reflections of cultural values, social relationships and the like. (An older variant of this paradigm is functionalism, whereby such images are interpreted as serving to promote or maintain important values and relationships.) In some respects this approach, or more modern symbolist versions thereof, is perfectly reasonable. Certainly, one should expect to find some connection between a community’s social institutions and practices and ideational themes which find regular expression in its culture. Moreover, one should expect attitudes attaching to particular images to reflect a communties dominant values. Ultimately, however, this social anthropological approach to the wildman is as problematic as the view that such figures reflect real creatures or culturally preserved memories of such creatures.

Wildmen, spiritual beings and an ethnozoological approach Thus far my objective has been to demonstrate the epistemological ambiguity of the category I label ‘wildman’. On the one hand, wildmen, being described by Southeast Asian communities largely in naturalistic terms, appear to anthropologists rather more credible as empirical possibilities than, say, the spirits and witches whose study has long been a mainstay of anthropology. Their greater plausibility draws not only on the fact that wildmen are typically not able to disappear, change shape or turn into animals, as spirits are able to do, but also on their resemblance to the reconstructions of another branch of anthropology, the hominids of palaeoanthropology. On the other hand, wildmen appear to anthropologists as not quite credible enough, particularly if construed as zoologically ‘undiscovered’ non-sapiens hominids or even as some sort

An example of the wildman image apparently serving a particular social purpose is found in the widespread figure of the bogey (or bogeyman). In several diverse cultural settings – including the islands of Flores and Sumba in eastern Indonesia, possibly China, and Europe during the late middle ages – images of wildmen have been invoked as ways of threatening and hence controlling disobedient children. Yet wildman representations are not employed in this way everywhere they occur. For example, the Sumatran orang pendek is not used as a bogey; nor are all categories of wildmen found on the island of Flores. What is more, even where wildmen are bogeymen, they are usually only one of several frightening figures which can be so deployed. The Nage of Flores thus threaten children not only with their local wildmen, ebu gogo (and do so even though they otherwise represent these creatures as long extinct). Nage parents also invoke the threat of witches, stealers of human heads, malevolent spirits, and nowadays even ‘tourists’. As this shows, virtually any kind of human, or part human, figure can be used for this disciplinary purpose. Moreover, tourists, at least, are empirical beings, as were Dutch colonialists, who according to Nage and other Indonesians were once the ultimate perpetrators in the theft of local human heads.

of ape far more humanlike than anything so far known to science. It is this ‘betwixt and between’ quality that has rendered the wildman, if not actually taboo subject in academic anthropology, then a topic of at best peripheral interest.

By the same token, wildman figures have received rather more attention from historians and other students of the humanities. A few anthropologists have indeed dealt with them, yet in virtually every case, they have treated the figures as spiritual beings. An example is found in Steedly’s work on the Karo of northern Sumatra, where she discusses a category of beings that Karo call umang. Occasionally, Steedly refers to the umang as ‘wildmen’, but for the most part she describes them as ‘supernatural’ beings and focuses on the role they supposedly play as familiars of spirit mediums. In fact, especially in regard to their physical description, recorded by several colonial ethnographers, these northern Sumatran figures appear very similar to the orang pendek – the creature that some primatologists and journalists are still looking for in southern Sumatra. Moreover, older ethnographers described how Karo regard umang not as ‘spirits’ but as ‘humans’. Acknowledging one of her predecessors (the German ethnographer Hagen), Steedly herself appears to agree with this feature of local Karo classification, remarking how ‘the characterization of the umang as a special kind of human (or rather, quasi-human) being is still current among Karo today’ (1993: 259). But this does not dissuade her from treating the umang as essentially imaginary, spiritual beings.

Radically distinguishing wildmen from spirits appears to be a feature not only of Karo classification but also of local knowledge in other Southeast Asian societies. The distinction certainly applies among societies of Flores Island, where named spirit categories (such as the Nage nitu) expressly exclude locally posited hominoids. People on Sumba also deny that their wildmen (the mili mongga) are a kind of spiritual being, pointing out several ways in which the two categories are significantly different. I would suggest, then, that if we are to get anywhere in understanding wildman images, in Southeast Asia or elsewhere, we need to respect distinctions recognized by local people themselves. In other words, we can do no better than follow the old anthropological prescription of beginning with what Malinowski long ago called ‘the native’s point-ofview’. This indeed will be the starting point of what I describe as an ethnozoological approach, concerned with situating the wildman in the broader context of local knowledge systems partly through a study of classifications. This approach does not promise a definitive answer to the question of whether or not wildmen ‘really exist’, but it may demonstrate two crucial ideas. The first is that, in order to deal comparatively with figures like the wildman, we need to develop analytical categories besides ‘spiritual being’ – or at any rate a larger class of ‘non-empirical beings’ that takes into proper account distinctions fundamental to local epistemologies. The second is that the category of the wildman, despite its relative neglect, really is an important topic for anthropology, and perhaps especially for the anthropology of Southeast Asia. < Literature - Bernheimer, R. 1952. Wild Men in the Middle Ages: A Study in Art, Sentiment, and Demonology. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

- Brown, P., T. Sutikna, M.J. Morwood, R.P. Soejono, Jatmiko. E. Wayhu Saptomo, and Rokus Awe Due. 2004. ‘A New Small-bodied

While lending an air of fantasy to the figure of the wildman, therefore, its possible use as a bogeyman hardly determines its ontological status. The more general methodological point is that attributing fantastic features to a category does not preclude its empirical existence. After all, in Southeast Asia and elsewhere, local people credit many animals – including non-human primates, large reptiles and tigers – with powers and characteristics which certainly have no zoological support. Such creatures might, for example, be thought capable of assuming human form or harming humans by mystical means, and yet no one would therefore argue that these animals should be understood as entirely or primarily imaginary beings.

Hominin from the Late Pleistocene of Flores, Indonesia’. Nature 431 (issue no. 7012): 1055-61.

- Dudley, Edward J. and Maximillian E. Novak, eds. 1972. The Wild Man Within: An Image in Western Thought from the Renaissance to Romanticism. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.

- Forth, Gregory. 1998. Beneath the Volcano: Religion, Cosmology and Spirit Classification among the Nage of Eastern Indonesia. (VKI 177) Leiden: KITLV Press.

- ----. 2005. ‘Hominids, Hairy Hominoids and the Science of Humanity’. Anthropology Today 21 (3): 13-17.

- M. Halpin and M. Ames, eds.1980. Manlike Monsters on Trial: Early Records and Modern Evidence. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, pp. 83-96.

- Steedly, Mary M. 1993. Hanging Without a Rope: Narrative Expe-

Another essentially sociological approach would be to interpret wildman images as a form of ethnic slander, a derogatory representation of ethnic others considered less cultured and somehow more ‘primitive’ than the own group. In fact, this should be among the first possibilities an anthropologist investigates in studying particular wildman categories. For the interpretation to be valid, however, the slandered group should at least be identifiable. Furthermore, in regard to physical features, the distortion should presumably extend

rience in Colonial and Postcolonial Karoland. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

- Stoczkowski, Wiktor. 2002. Explaining Human Origins: Myth, Imagination and Conjecture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Stone figure of a wildman (makatoba) forming part of a tombstone in the eastern Sumbanese village of Parai Yawangu. The creature depicted is known by several other names, including ‘mili mongga’ and ‘meu rumba’. According to the author’s estimate it is about 100 years old.

Gregory Forth is professor of anthropology at the University of Alberta, Canada. He was an IIAS fellow in 2005-2006. gforth@ualberta.ca

Photo taken by author, June 2006

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11

Sex in the city

> Research

Lena Scheen

M

ian Mian and Wei Hui are prominent among writers of the ‘Post70’ generation: those born after 1970, who witnessed socialism’s metamorphosis into a market economy and society’s embrace of commercialisation and consumerism. As Mian Mian remarked: ‘When I was young there was absolutely nothing to do in Shanghai, there were no pubs or discos. On my seventeenth birthday I went to Shenzhen where I lived a rough life. After five years I came back to Shanghai and the city had totally changed, that’s when I started to write’.1 While Shenzhen became a Special Economic Zone in 1980, Shanghai obtained that coveted status only in 1990. Over the next decade the city witnessed an explosion of destruction and renewal, becoming a landscape of dusty trenches, rising cranes and skyscraper skeletons.

Ian Buruma has described Shanghai’s makeover as the greatest urban transformation since Haussmann rebuilt Paris in the 19th century; the city’s inhabitants have had to confront a drastically changing society as well as the physical disappearance of familiar surroundings at a pace and scale unmatched in any other Chinese city.

Shanghai is Pudong … the Orient Pearl TV Tower, Asia’s tallest. Its long, long steel column pierces the sky, proof of the city’s phallus worship. … all these signs of material prosperity are aphrodisiacs the city uses to 12

Jiang Lidong

Mian Mian pouring beer on Wei Hui’s head in a Shanghai bar; Wei Hui baring her breasts at a press conference; mutual threats on the internet – self-labelled Beauty Writers Mian Mian and Wei Hui fear no accusations in their public catfight over alleged plagiarism in turn-of-the-century Shanghai. The rivalry began after publication of their semi-autobiographical ‘shock novels’ portraying hedonists searching for love and self in Shenzhen and Shanghai. Plagiarism or not, Wei Hui’s Shanghai Baby and Mian Mian’s Candy are products of their time.

intoxicate itself. They have nothing to do with us, the people who live among them. A car accident or a disease can kill us, but the city’s prosperous, invincible silhouette is like a planet, in perpetual motion, eternal.

The passage is from Wei Hui’s novel Shanghai Baby, translated by Bruce Humes, a story about the young writer Coco (after Coco Chanel), who falls in love with the impotent painter Tian Tian and the German businessman Mark. Not coincidentally, the above scene takes place on the Bund, symbol of Shanghai for over a century. On this road along the western bank of the Huangpu River, western colonial settlers built trading houses, consulates, banks and hotels – beautifully preserved Art Deco and neoclassical buildings. Just like Coco and her lover, people from all over China flock to the Bund everyday to stroll along the river and gaze at the other side: the Pudong area with its futuristic skyline, all flickering neon-lit glass and steel skyscrapers. The area was still mainly farmland until 1990, when it was officially designated to become the financial hub of new Superpower China. Remarkably, most buildings behind the ultramodern façade are still empty, making the area more of a giant mission statement than an actual business centre. The visual spectacle seems to function as an image reinforcing the city government’s slogan ‘Shanghai is the future’ – a slogan Mian Mian ironically refers to in her novel Panda: ‘Everyone says that Shanghai is the future.

What will the future be like? The answer to that question is like this big X at the floor indicator of the elevator, the X that quickly flashes from 1 to 54’.

The protagonist in this passage is standing in the elevator of the Jin Mao (Gold Luxuriance) Tower in Pudong, the tallest building in China, its East-meets-West design signifying Shanghai’s emergence as a modern global city. For Mian Mian and Wei Hui’s characters, Pudong’s skyscrapers represent the ‘prosperity’ of modernising Shanghai and at the same time the ‘emptiness’ of its prosperity. Or in Mian Mian’s words: ‘Shanghai today

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is only about business, business, business, it’s without culture…Shanghai is fake, Shanghai is empty, Shanghai is Pudong, you know’.

Freedom or loss of control?

Mian Mian and Wei Hui’s novels reveal ambivalence towards contemporary Shanghai. The protagonists lead decadent lives of travelling, eating in expensive restaurants and shopping for designer clothing. They glorify newlyattained wealth, freedom and endless lifestyle choices, but criticise their artificiality, emptiness and destructive potential. Their characters continuously renegotiate their identity in a rapidly changing environment. As Mian Mian writes in ‘I love Shanghai’: This is my hometown. For over a decade I have watched it evolve. And I have been changed by it. To me, each shift has been a soft touch, a little murmur. The city’s progress has also brought with it some things that make me sad. Everything has happened so quickly, the Shanghainese are lost, dizzy and confused – especially the young people.

Unable to cope with drastic change and sudden freedom, the characters escape into an underworld of sex, drugs and hard rock. Mian Mian’s characters in particular show a predilection for violence, addiction and suicide; the main character in her collection of stories, La La La, remarks: ‘Did we lose control of ourselves because we were seeking freedom, or was our freedom itself just a kind of loss of control?’ Because of their sexually provocative stories, Mian Mian and Wei Hui are also labelled Body Writers, described by Chinese critics such as Zha Xiduo, Chen Dongfeng and Zhang Helong as ‘writing with their body and thinking with their skin’. Perpetual urban change has triggered a retreat into private spaces, bathrooms and bedrooms; the body is one of the only constants one can fall back on.

While Mian Mian and Wei Hui’s fiction reflects urban experience, it also feeds back into such experience. Many

of their stories are set in the Shanghai night, with characters taking taxis from nightclub to nightclub. The streets and clubs are actual places in Shanghai; some have become popular among readers. Although the novels blur the line between the ‘real’ and imagined Shanghai, they make use of ‘a mythologising “spatial rhetoric” that elides great chunks of the city and exaggerates others, transforming Shanghai into a sexualised archipelago of expatriate parties and nightspots inhabited by voracious white-collar women, artists, foreigners, and prostitutes’ (Farrer 2002: 33). The explicit descriptions of sex, drugs, prostitution, AIDS and suicide prompted the government to ban La La La, Shanghai Baby and Candy. The ban increased their popularity in China and abroad, and granted them a certain cult status: Mian Mian gained fame within the urban counter-culture, while Wei Hui became a role model for Chinese youth across the country and even in Japan, where she is one of the most popular contemporary Chinese writers. According to a Chinese newspaper, a book-signing tour in Japan attracted long lines of young women and old men waiting for Wei Hui’s autograph ‘with tears in their eyes’. Japanese youth also identify themselves with Wei Hui’s characters’ desire for social and sexual liberation. One Japanese girl was quoted in the newspaper as saying: ‘After reading Wei Hui’s books I could finally understand the meaning of sex, now I know it’s something very complicated that can be beautiful as well as sad. I am not afraid of it anymore.’

I am like a Panda now The Post-70s are clearly conscious of urban transformation, which contrasts with a new generation of writers, such as Han Han, Guo Jingming and Zhou Jianing labelled the ‘Post-80s’. This younger group of writers grew up during the construction boom without having consciously experienced the earlier situation. As a result, they write about urban transformation from the inside.

In their work the mushrooming skyscrapers and commercialising society seem a ‘natural’ part of the setting; the

characters behave like uncritical consumers whose lives are determined by fleeting and coincidental events and thrills. After the initial shock, the latest works of the Post-70s, too, display a softer tone and show a tendency toward adaptation. The protagonist in Wei Hui’s latest novel Marrying Buddha still seeks sexual pleasure but also devotes herself to traditional Chinese religion and philosophy. Mian Mian’s latest novel Panda reflects, according to China Daily, ‘her new-found maturity after steering her life clear of drugs, booze and even sex’.

The cover also includes an English title: Panda Sex. As Mian Mian bluntly explains: ‘A panda has only sex twice a year, I’m like a panda now.’ < Note 1. All quotations from Mian Mian are from my interviews with her in October and November 2005. Wei Hui and Mian Mian’s writings have attracted attention from Chinese critics as well as scholars of Chinese literature including Megan Ferry, Sabina Knight, Harry Kuoshu and Yue Tao. Wei Hui and Mian Mian’s visit to the Amsterdam China Festival in October 2005 was sponsored by IIAS.

References - Farrer, James. 2002. Opening Up: Youth Sex Culture and Market Reform in Shanghai. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.

- Mian Mian. 1997. La La La [La La La] Hong Kong: Xianggang xinshiji chubanshe.

- -----. 2001. ‘I love Shanghai’. Asia Week 27-12.

- -----. 2003. Andrea Lingenfelter, trans.

Candy. London: Little Brown and Company.

- -----. 2004. Xiongmao [Panda Sex]. Beijing: Qunyan chubanshe.

- Wei Hui. 2001. Bruce Humes, trans.

Shanghai Baby. New York: Simon and Schuster.

- -----. 2005. Marrying Buddha. Larissa Heinrich, trans. London: Constable & Robinson.

Lena Scheen is a PhD candidate (‘Writing Shanghai: Urban Experience in Contemporary Chinese Fiction’) at the CNWS Research School of Leiden University. l.scheen@let.leidenuniv.nl

> Research

Whose comrades? Gay festivals in China Beijing, 16 December 2005, 3pm. Two hours before Beijing’s first Gay and Lesbian Culture Festival, organisers are making final arrangements at On/Off, a well-known Beijing gay bar, when policemen barge in. Despite organisers’ fervent defence of the festival’s innocuous nature, the officers insist the event is illegal without prior official consent. After finding an expired fire extinguisher, the police force the owner to close his bar for a week. The first attempt to launch a major cultural event featuring the Chinese gay community is stymied. term ‘homosexual’ – is that it reflects increasing self-awareness within these communities.

R e m y Cr i s t i n i

I

n China, freedom of assembly is restricted by meticulous regulations aimed at safeguarding ‘homeland security’, ‘social stability’ and ‘spiritual civilisation’. Any assembly that might wield social or political influence must have government approval. In their discussion with organisers at On/Off, police officers stated the problem was not the festival’s subject matter, but the organisers’ failure to apply for authorisation.

The first part of this statement may sound surprisingly liberal, but should not be interpreted too optimistically. The organisers had actually considered requesting authorisation but were advised not to do so by Aizhi (爱知, ‘Love Knowledge’), a largely foreign-funded, government-approved NGO dedicated to safe sex awareness and gay rights’ issues. In Aizhi’s opinion – presumably substantiated by earlier experiences – an application for authorisation would most probably have been turned down.

The first Beijing Gay and Lesbian Culture Festival was supposed to focus on a broad range of issues touched on in two more modest Beijing gay and lesbian film festivals, in December 2001 and April 2005, respectively, which had also met with official interference but were not called off altogether. It was almost certainly the larger scale of the first Beijing Gay and Lesbian Culture Festival that drew government attention.

The festival programme had been announced well in advance by online newsgroups and a website; the publicized presence of eminent guests and speakers from China and abroad, as well as an impressive list of media, probably triggered police intervention.

Comrades-in-culture…

Nevertheless, during the three days the festival would have lasted, several ‘underground’ meetings took place. Strengthened by the degree of organisation within the gay community, expressions of support by both gay and straight would-havebeen festival visitors and increased media interest, organisers seemed confident that a similar festival with official consent could be possible in the near future. As early as the day after the police crackdown, Reuters and many newspapers, including some in Hong Kong and Korea, reported it. Some mainland-Chinese media reports considered possible reasons why police had intervened, while others reported that the festival actually did take place and hailed it as a significant step in the gay emancipation process. Notably, both types of reporting seemed to sympathise with Chinese gays, who interpreted such positive media attention (as opposed to disparagement or ignoring it altogether) as conducive to an open-minded attitude towards homosexuality in Chinese society. And although the police consistently monitor the festival website – from which they learned about it in the first place – at this writing it is still online. This is all the more remarkable because it prominently features reports of the crackdown, including citations from foreign media.

One of the discussion topics originally scheduled for the ­festival was ‘comrade culture’. The term comrade (同志, in Chinese, literally meaning ‘of the same intent’ and broadly used in communist discourse) is preferred over homosexual (同性恋) by Chinese gays and lesbians to signal consciousness of themselves as an organised social group. Thus it has become a common form of address within the gay community and given rise to such terms as comrade literature, referring to works of fiction with gay themes, a genre that has flourished in recent years through the internet. Occasionally, mainstream media also adopt the term to refer to gays.

Another Foucauldian concept that is central to Queer theorization, and that might also apply to the Chinese situation, is the ‘tactical polyvalence of discourse’ (Foucault 1990:100). The fact that people are socially labelled, although perhaps involuntarily at first, can have an empowering effect. In China, the socially oppressed gays of the 1980s became a more coherent and self-conscious community in the 1990s through new networking possibilities offered by the internet. Adopting the term comrade demonstrates group empowerment and signals, in the light of identity politics, that the gay community controls the naming of its identities.

there is a Chinese translation of ‘queer’ (酷儿) that is used in terms such as queer theory and queer nation, but it generally corresponds to international discourse in the field and is hardly ever employed to refer to the Chinese gay community.

That said, drawing parallels between ‘queer’ and ‘comrade’ helps conceptualise the latter term.

…become Comrades-in-politics Based on Foucault’s theoretical legacy, referring to links between (sexual) identity and discourse as the ‘discursive effects of available cultural categories’ (Jagose 1996:82), queer theory contests the essentialist perception of sexual identity as something innate or fixed and defines sexual identities (eg, gays and heterosexuals) as social constructs. Queer as an alternative, auto-descriptive term for non-heteronormative sexual or gender identities emphasizes this (post-) structuralist awareness, and has developed against a social background of sexual emancipation in the West in the 20th century. An unmistakable correlation between the western gay community’s adoption of ‘queer’ and the Chinese gay community’s adoption of ‘comrade’ – as opposed to using the pathologizing

The importance of self-identification in relation to sexual identity is also specifically emphasized by queer theorists. Comrade emerged out of the Chinese gay community itself, and was subsequently adopted as a conscious identity marker. Hence, with reference to gay festivals and similar events, it makes more sense to speak of comrade culture than of Chinese gay and lesbian culture; the former shows that we are dealing with expressions of a self-conscious social group rather than attempting to encompass the doings of all Chinese gays.

Cultural articulation In what sense, then, do gay festivals articulate comrade culture? An obvious answer would be that the festivals themselves are manifestations or statements of – that is, by – comrade culture, referring to both the festivals’ origins and their subject matter. In this respect, it is especially interesting to note that, while both festival organisers and participants include people who identify themselves as comrades, both groups also include a fair number of people who don’t. How do the latter relate to comrade culture? On the one hand, they are referred to ex negativo as ‘non-comrades’ (非同志). On the other hand, they can arguably be seen to affirm the notion of a comrade culture by partaking in the festivals as visitors or being involved in their organisation; that is, non-comrades in their turn articulate a perception of gays as not just people with a non-standard sexual preference, but as a community with a shared identity that manifests itself in social and cultural ways (comrade culture) within society at large. By participating, non-comrades demonstrate a tolerance for coexistence and might even find common ground between comrade culture and their own ‘heterosexual’ cultural perceptions in terms of lifestyle (eg, individual expression) or interests (eg, artistic taste).

If non-comrade participation in comrade culture demonstrates tolerance, what are we to make of the increased positive interest of the mainstream media? It leaves us with an important but as yet unanswerable question: does media interest signal a growing readiness in Chinese society to acknowledge the notion of a comrade culture – even if it is not (yet) widely referred to as such? < Works cited - Foucault, Michel (trans. Robert Hurley). 1990. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction. New York: Vintage Books.

- Jagose, Annamarie. 1996. Queer Theory: An Introduction. New York: NYU Press.

Online resources www.aizhi.org/ (Aizhi website) www.bglff.org/ (website of the 2nd Beijing Gay and Lesbian Film ­Festival) www.bglcf.org/ (website of the 1st Beijing Gay and Lesbian Culture

Comrade culture is not synonymous with a cultural subset to which all Chinese gays, defined as men who have sex with men and women who have sex with women, automatically belong. Comrade is a more complex social concept, partly based on sexual identity (ie, homosexuality or non-straight sexuality) but also attesting to the mechanism of identity politics as an auto-descriptive and group-empowering term.

Although the comrade concept bears some similarity to the sense of ‘queer’, the terms are not interchangeable. In fact,

Festival)

Remy Cristini studied Sinology at Leiden University and now works at the library of the Chinese Department. He is pursuing PhD research on articulations of comrade culture (gay scene, comrade literature, films, festivals/events, and scholarly and popular discourse). www.sino.uni-heidelberg.de/dachs/leiden/tongzhi/rvc.html R.V.Cristini@let.leidenuniv.nl

IIAS Newsletter | #41 | Summer 2006

13

> Research

Ida Bagus Nyoman Rai: painter of history The Balinese painter Ida Bagus Nyoman Rai died in 2000, leaving behind one of the few depictions of the Japanese occupation of Bali, an enigmatic work that has only now come to public attention. A ‘history painting’ that tells us much about Balinese art and its development during the modernist period, it also shows how art that appears to represent history ambiguously can actually enhance our understanding of it. nese vessel (the Sasago Maru) was false.

The battle’s net effect was a weakening of Allied forces prior to the larger Battle of the Java Sea.

Adrian Vickers and Leo Haks

I

da Bagus Nyoman Rai (who also used the last name Tengkeng or Klingking) was born into a poor brahmana, or Brahman, family between 1907 and 1920 in Sanur and began painting as a teenager.

During the 1930s Sanur, like many Balinese villages, produced a great number of artists; most were very young and new to art. Inspired by Bali’s aesthetic qualities, they created for new audiences, including western newcomers who, using their economic and artistic influence, favoured images of a romanticized and timeless Bali like those produced by western artists. Dozens of highly original Balinese artists rejected this romanticisation and instead portrayed the modern reality in which they found themselves. Foremost amongst them were leading artists from the village of Sanur, including I.B. Rai who, at the time of his death, was among the last of the school’s first generation. Though second and third generations persisted, the school’s influence weakened after the second world war, making I.B. Rai an important link to the school’s birth and trademark style of strong lines against background depictions of local sites.

Leo Haks, a collector of Balinese paintings of the pre-war or ‘modernist’ period,1 had long known about the collection of Theo Meier (1908-1982), a Swiss artist who lived on Bali during the 1930s and 1940s. Meier had married a Thai woman and moved to Chiang Mai, where upon his death in 1982 his wife honoured him by locking the door to his collection. She did not open it for 20 years, after she decided to back a dealer writing her husband’s biography. The dealer bought all the paintings and, in 2003, Haks himself got his first look at an extraordinary record of works that depart from the standard images of Balinese painting. Amongst the collection are a number of works that provide new understanding of Balinese modes of depicting history, including the remarkable work of I.B. Rai depicting the Japanese on Bali. Rai’s painting captures the viewer’s attention instantly because of its dramatic composition and subject matter.

Art imitating life?

Set on a northern stretch of Sanur beach known as Padang Galak (Wild Fields), the painting’s foreground depicts Japanese soldiers supervising labourers sinking piles just offshore. In the background the beach is a battlefield that curves like a rainbow from the painting’s lower left-hand corner to its upper right-hand corner, where it meets a line of volcanoes known to mark the centre of Bali. As soldiers standing on the beach shoot their rifles, six planes fly overhead; a seventh has crashed into the sea near a sunken ship and three swimmers. Finally, passing by two small sailboats, two ships approach from the painting’s upper right-hand corner. The soldiers on shore appear to be firing at 14

Painting history

Ida Bagus Nyoman Rai, ‘The Battle of Bali’, 1942. Washed pen and ink on paper, 49 x 55 cm. courtesy of Leo Haks

Rai’s painting certainly reflects some elements of the above historical accounts and likely does depict the Battle of Bali. But it also includes events that did not necessarily happen during that battle, such as what is most likely the 5 February air raid in which an Allied plane was shot down, and Japan’s building of local infrastructure – the sinking of piles – using forced labour. Thus neither I.B. Rai’s nor similar Balinese paintings that treat historical events is a ‘photographic’ record.

Rai’s painting captures at least three separate moments in order to represent what the Japanese arrival in Bali meant to the artist; strictly speaking, it presents a parochial, and not Balinese, history. It does not record actual events but how the Balinese perceived those events and main actors: the Japanese as authoritarian, the Allies as distant and indistinguishable, the Balinese as the slaves or supporters of either.

The painting demonstrates how representational works can enrich the construction of historical accounts by providing unique points of view that can both inform and be informed by other sources. < Notes

the swimmers and approaching ships.

The painting begs the question: What battle is this?

by Balinese ‘disappeared’ soon after and were believed to have been rescued by the Americans. 5

Leo Haks tried to find out. Historian Geoffrey Robinson suggested that the painting could depict the Allied landing on Bali of 2 March 1946, although he conceded that ‘the landing occurred without a single shot fired by either side.

Nor, to our knowledge, did the Allies employ air support during the landing’.2 Frank Morgan, an occasional Bali resident, told Haks that his step-father had served in the Yogyakarta-based Seventh Bomber Group until January 1942 and had bombed Japanese troop transports unloading ‘on the beach just at the north end of the Sanur reef’.3 Morgan’s information was promising, especially since Bali-based Researcher Fred B. Eiseman’s data on Bali’s Allied air defence confirmed it.4 But was it definitive?

Gedar’s memories match several accounts of Allied engagements during the ‘The Battle of Bali’ (also known as ‘The Battle of Badung Strait’): the initial attempt to defend Bali from Japanese air attacks on 5 February, in which one Allied plane was shot down and another crash landed; the downing of Japanese bombers over Java and Bali on 18 February; attacks on Japanese ships on 1920 February that cost two Allied planes over Bali and Java; and later raids that destroyed up to ten Japanese planes at the cost of a number (sources vary as to the total) of Allied casualties.6 However, none of these accounts, including Gedar’s, specifically mentions the painting’s depiction of a sunken ship. Could the sinking also have taken place during ‘The Battle of Bali’?

Haks continued to dig. He met Wayan Gedar (b. 1924), a Sanur hero of the Revolution and one of the Pemuda who had resisted the Dutch. Gedar remembers the Japanese ordering the building of a bridge, which he and other locals used, across the river mouth north of Sanur, and an American air attack on Sanur at the beginning of the Japanese occupation, although he could not specify a year.

During a morning battle that lasted from four to ten o’clock, he witnessed the downing of an American plane; two injured crewmen helped ashore

IIAS Newsletter | #41 | Summer 2006

Allies also responded by sea: a first wave consisted of two light cruisers, two destroyers, and two ‘fourstackers’ that departed Surabaya late on 18 February to engage the Japanese at night; while darkness afforded the advantage of surprise, the Americans did not calculate that it also put the moon behind them, which illuminated their position to the Japanese.

1. Haks, F., Jop Ubbens, Adrian Vickers, Leo Haks, and Guus Maris. 1999. Pre-War Balinese Modernists 1928-1942: An Additional Page in Art History. Haarlem: Ars et Animatio.

2. Robinson, Geoffrey. 27 August 2003.

Personal communication to Leo Haks.

3. Morgan, Frank. 26 April 2004. Personal communication to Leo Haks.

4. Craven, W.F, and J.L. Cate, eds. 1948.

Plans and Early Operations, January 1939

What do other sources say?

Nevertheless, Allied forces claimed success,9 though accounts differ. According to a Dutch naval source, only one ship was sunk and it was Dutch: the destroyer Piet Hein, whose crew members the Japanese fired on as they tried to swim to safety. This could have inspired the painting’s scene of Japanese soldiers shooting at swimmers, even though the ship had sunk at night and thus ship and swimmers might not have been visible unless illuminated by moonlight.

The same source states that islanders helped ship survivors who reached shore escape to Surabaya.

We know the Japanese landed on Bali on 18 February 1942, with only four Japanese destroyers and two transport ships nearby. According to one source, the U.S. countered with ‘thirteen B-17 high altitude bombers and seven A-24 dive bombers, without any escort of fighter planes’. 7 The source mentions neither downed planes nor sunken ships. Regarding other Allied air forces, a more contemporary source states only that ‘the Dutch Air Force lost many planes in attacks and efforts to reconnoitre’. 8 The

A second wave of the Allied naval response, comprised of four American ships, followed the next day but only damaged Japanese ships before withdrawing when the Dutch light cruiser Tromp and the U.S. destroyer Stewart were damaged. Dutch and U.S. sources claimed subsequent Allied bomber raids sunk perhaps 20 Japanese ships off Bali,10 but later accounts revealed this was an exaggeration. Only one Japanese ship, the Michishio, sustained damaged, while a U.S. claim to have sunk a Japa-

to August 1942. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

5. Gedar, I Wayan. 22 June 2004. Interview with Leo Haks, Sanur.

6. Craven and Cate, op cit.

7. Ramires, Felipe C. nd. ‘Fall of Bali and the naval battle of the Badoeng Strait 18-20 of February of 1942’. http://smmlonline. com/articles/badoeng.html (accessed 4 April 2005).

8. Heuren, Lieutenant Hhr. J. C. N. van. 1943.

‘The Battle of Bali’. Asiatic Review 39 9.

Ibid. p.189

10. Ibid. pp.189-92

Adrian Vickers is Professor of Asian Studies at the University of Wollongong and conducted this research as part of an Australian Research Council project on Indonesian historiography, a collaboration with KITLV. avickers@uow.edu.au Leo Haks is a collector and art dealer based in Amsterdam. www.leohaks.com

> Research

Engaging cultures across the Timor Sea As modernisation and globalisation extend into eastern Indonesia, traditional culture’s decline in rural communities is undermining the vibrancy and dynamism of their arts. A partnership between two organisations in Australia and Indonesia is supporting a rededication of these communities to the traditions and values of the past through a program that facilitates a re-imagining of their place in the future.

Traditional knowledge of dance, music and textile production is less and less concerned with nourishing the cultural life of villages and more focused on satisfying the demands of the market. This has resulted in the production of low-quality synthetic textiles and, in the case of the performing arts, performances that are repetitious rather than challenging and interesting to the audience, to the performers, or to the art form itself. The situation is exacerbated by the fact that younger generations can now afford schooling and are not involved in village life to the same extent as previous generations. There are therefore fewer opportunities to transmit knowledge and inject new life into these art forms.

Georgia Sedgwick

A

ustralia and Indonesia have a long history of cultural engagement, the earliest recorded contact going back 400 years when Bugis Makassan traders sailed to the shores of East Arnhem Land in northern Australia to trade sea cucumbers with the local Yolgnu people. Modern-day cultural encounters traverse a much broader landscape; traces of those early connections, however, continue to resonate and it is these historical links that form the basis of the Northern Territory-Eastern Indonesia Partnership programme.

Asialink at the University of Melbourne in Australia and the Kelola Foundation in Indonesia are extending their existing Australia-Indonesia Arts Management Program to encompass a pilot cultural partnership programme between the Northern Territory and eastern Indonesia.1 It aims to support the development of community cultural centres in eastern Indonesia currently working towards the revitalisation of the traditional arts through a programme of exchanges between indigenous arts centres and other cultural institutions in the Northern Territory.

How then is re-dedication to traditional values encouraged in a less than supportive environment? One place to start is to identify existing structures that could support this kind of activity. It is from this position that the Northern Territory-Eastern Indonesia Partnership proceeds, focusing on the sanggar (studio, collective), the main centres for training and producing traditional art for visiting tourists and local and international markets. There is immense potential for these centres to develop into community cultural centres that nurture both the cultural and economic life of the community through the production of high-quality performances and textiles for discerning consumers. Sanggars might also be developed as venues for the presentation of works produced, thereby facilitating more active community involvement and generating pride and value in local living traditions and culture.

The programme recognises the achievements of the indigenous arts sector in the Northern Territory, its commercial and critical success in the national and international art scenes and its capacity to rejuvenate the cultural traditions of oncedevastated communities. Blossoming from humble beginnings in the 1980s, the market for indigenous artwork in the territory is now estimated to be worth A$100 million a year.

This income allows communities to stay together, ensuring the transmission of traditional knowledge and ways of life and a sense of pride in the traditions.

Assuming a mentorship role in the program is Yovita Meta, founder and manager of the non-profit Tafaen Pah Foundation in Kefamenanu, West Timor. The Foundation is a weaving cooperative and gallery that supports the work of 25 self-managing groups of female weavers from surrounding villages. Prior to the establishment of the Foundation, local weavers had almost completely abandoned traditional methods of producing textiles, opting for more affordable machine-made cotton and more vibrant but environmentally destructive chemical dyes. Traditional motifs and weaving styles were traded for those that were easier to make and in demand, producing a glut of textiles that were neither culturally significant nor of high artistic or technical quality.

Workshops and training programmes are now conducted at the Foundation to share traditional knowledge of textile production, including instruction on ikat,2 supplementary weft and tapestry weaving, natural dyeing and hand-spinning cotton with the aim of producing the highest quality textiles for local and international markets. The cultural significance of the motifs and the associated music and dance traditions that complement them are also shared, ensuring their transmission to younger generations and cementing their place in the futures of these communities. The Foundation’s success has encouraged men from local villages to participate in offshoot activities, for example, using profits from sales to cultivate the cotton and indigo necessary for producing the textiles and establishing house-building co-operatives. The Foundation is an inspiring example of how the re-articulation of traditional culture in a contemporary context can empower communities, both economically and culturally.

Theory into practice The Foundation and the indigenous art centre models will serve as the starting point for the development of eastern Indonesian sanggars involved in the pilot programme. Key arts practitioners and community leaders working towards the revitalisation of the traditional arts will be identified to engage in cultural exchange internships with local sanggars, indigenous Australian art centres and other key Australian cultural institutions. The Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory (MAGNT), which houses an extensive collection of material culture from across eastern Indonesia, will play a key role in supporting this programme. These organisations will facilitate an understanding of the immense potential community cultural centres have to maintain, interpret and nurture local cultures and identities. The programme’s format is intended to provide participants with an understanding of the strategies these organisations employ, the possibilities for applying these models in their own communities, and the opportunity to build networks and skills to support this development.

Art centres, located within indigenous communities across Australia, are the main centres for the production of indigenous artwork and training in the performing arts in remote areas, and fulfil a variety of functions depending on the needs of the community within which they operate. The Buku-Larrnggay Mulka Art Centre and Museum in East Arnhem Land is an example of a highly successful model, owing in large part to the emphasis placed on cultural maintenance by the local community. The Centre is not only a venue for the display and sale of artworks (sales are also made via the Centre’s website), it also has a museum and printing studio and will soon establish a knowledge centre to document and present the written, pictorial and oral histories of the local community. The local Yirrkala people have a strong sense of the role the Centre plays in maintaining and revitalising local traditions, and invest much of their time and energy supporting its programmes.

The ability of indigenous Australian communities to maintain cultural integrity while catering to the demands of the market has in the main eluded their eastern Indonesian counterparts, and it is the challenge of this programme to find economically and culturally sustainable ways for these communities to strike a similar balance.

Through experimentation and cultural exchange, the Northern Territory-Eastern Indonesia Partnership programme seeks to facilitate a revitalising role for sanggar by developing their potential as a community resource. Stimulating informed ‘cultural tourism’ and establishing new and more discerning markets will provide the necessary economic support to foster pride and continued investment in the cultural heritage of these communities. <

The Indonesian context The traditional arts of eastern Indonesia, an area encompassing the islands of Sumba, Flores, Rote, Alor and West Timor, are rich and varied, reflecting the region’s great cultural diversity. It is predominantly the textile and performing arts traditions of eastern Indonesia that inform and complement the region’s broader cultural systems, and in this sense are traditionally the most integral to the daily life of these communities. However, in the years following independence in 1945, Indonesia has seen a significant shift in its cultural landscape; traditional arts in particular have struggled to maintain their relevance in the face of dramatic change. The impact of tourism, globalism and modernisation, the forced abandonment of traditional systems of organisation, dramatic transmigration policies, and an increase in accessible education have had a devastating – and in many cases irreversible – effect on traditional arts practice.

Tafaen Pah Foundation: a case in point

Notes 1. The program is supported by the Ford Foundation in Jakarta, an organisation concerned with the transmission of traditional arts to new generations of Indonesian performers and practitioners.

2. A fabric in which the yarns have been tie-dyed before weaving. From the Indonesian mengikat, ‘to tie’ or ‘to bind’.

Georgia Sedgwick is Project Officer at Asialink at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Asialink Arts promotes Australian engagement with the arts in Asia. g.sedgwick@asialink.unimelb.edu.au www.asialink.unimelb.edu.au/arts/projects/indointernships.html A member of the Tafaen Pah Foundation ­producing ikat textiles. courtesy Joanna Barrkman

IIAS Newsletter | #41 | Summer 2006

15

> Research

Bhutanese Nepalis or Nepali Bhutanese?

Since 1990 Bhutanese of Nepali descent have been forced to leave Bhutan and live as refugees in their ancestral land. Currently, more than 100,000 live in seven UNHCR-assisted refugee camps in the border districts of Jhapa and Morang in eastern Nepal. The Bhutanese government sees them as â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Nepaliâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; and wants them to stay in Nepal, while the Nepalis call them â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Bhutaneseâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; and want them to return. In the midst of this identity crisis, the refugees call themselves â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Bhutaneseâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; â&#x20AC;&#x201C; many possess Bhutanese citizenship cards, and want to return.

Despite several rounds of talks between Nepal and Bhutan, the refugees remain stateless and their identity remains as obscure as ever.

Satya Shrestha-Schipper

M

edia attention on Bhutan rarely transcends its image as Shangrila, and it only gets worse when it comes to the Bhutanese Nepali: reliable data is simply not available. The governmentâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s role in the mass exodus remains shrouded in secrecy; it claims that despite its pleas to Bhutanese Nepalis to stay in the country, many left after signing a â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;voluntary emigration formâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; to reside in UNHCR-managed camps in Nepal.

Signing the form meant the person was leaving willingly, and had received compensation for property left behind.

The government filmed and photographed people signing these forms, as evidence that the mass exit of a single ethnic group was not â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;ethnic cleansingâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; but rather â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;voluntary emigrationâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;. Voluntary or not, the question remains: Why have so many Bhutanese Nepalis left their country to reside in refugee camps? Finding an answer requires a look at the beginning of Nepali migration to Bhutan and the governmentâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s efforts to alternately segregate them and to integrate or assimilate them into mainstream Bhutanese culture.

Shrouded in clouds Bhutan, known as â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Druk Yulâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; (the Land of the Dragon), is a small Himalayan kingdom bordered to the north by the Tibetan Autonomous Region and to the east, west and south by India. Mountains dominate, but there is a narrow strip of lowland in the south, where much of the dense subtropical forest has been cleared to create farmland. As with all information from Bhutan, it is hard

to come up with reliable population figures. The last national census in 1969 counted just over 1m people and was subsequently revised down to 930,617 (Rose 1977: 41). Government documents continued to assume the population numbered over 1m, but in 1990 King Jigme Sigme Singye Wangchuck declared that it was only 600,000. The first National Human Development Report, published in 2000, estimated the 1998 population to be 636,499.

Although its origin and heritage is Buddhist, Bhutan is a multi-ethnic country.

Information on the populationâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s ethnic division is also unreliable. Recent estimates for the Ngalongs in the West, whose origin can be traced back to Tibet, vary from 10% to 28%; for the Sharchops (Easterners), from 30% to 40%; and for the Bhutanese Nepalis (Lhotshampa, â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Southernerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;), from 25% to 52% (Hutt, 2003: 7). Both the Ngalongs and Sharchops practise Tibetan-style Mahayan Buddhism and speak Tibeto-Burman languages and are collectively known as Drukpas. Dzongkha, originally spoken by the Ngalongs, has been the national language since 1961. The Bhutanese Nepalis are predominantly Hindu; most have their own language, but Nepali has been their lingua franca.

Into the mainstream The Nepali arrival in Bhutan remains controversial. According to the refugees, the Nepali presence dates back to the 17th century (Dhakal and Strawn, 1994: 115), whereas the Bhutanese government claims Nepalis were allowed into Bhutan only in 1900 (Hutt, 2003:

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16

IIAS Newsletter | #41 | Summer 2006

Indiaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s transportation to Nepal of the first wave of expelled Bhutanese Nepalis only encouraged the Bhutanese government to label those still residing in Bhutan as â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;illegal Nepali immigrantsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;.

In reality, they were Bhutanese and had been for generations, but government pressure and Indian collusion forced them into the country of their ancestors, a country they themselves had never known. Meanwhile, in 1997 Bhutan passed the New Citizenship Act, introducing still stricter requirements for obtaining citizenship. But even today, after having lived in the camps for over 14 years, refugees still consider themselves Bhutanese citizens.

As Bhutanese Nepalis fled Bhutan in the tens of thousands, international development organisations providing aid to Bhutan and the international media remained silent on the state persecution of a single ethnic group. The right to citizenship is one of the basic principles of democracy; the international community, otherwise actively engaged in promoting democracy in Asia, cannot ignore the plight of refugees abandoned in one of the worldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s poorest nations. < Satya Shrestha-Schipper International Institute for Asian Studies satya.shrestha@planet.nl

Publications.

on Conflict and Dissent. Gartmore: Kiscadale

besiegedâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;. Hutt, M., ed. Bhutan: Perspectives

Colombo, Sri Lanka.

- Thinley, J. Y. 1994. â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Bhutan: a kingdom

District of Nepal. Report submitted to ICES,

Refugees in their Prolonged Sojourn in Jhapa-

nence of Transition: the Study of the Bhutanese

aca: Cornell University Press.

- Shrestha-Schipper, S. 1999. Emergent Perma-

ers.

- Rose, L.E. 1977. The Politics of Bhutan. Ith-

ic History 1768-1846. Delhi: Adroit Publish-

Bhutan. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

- Regmi, M.C. 1972. A Study in Nepali Econom-

Nationhood, and the Flight of Refugees from

and Chicago: Pluto Press.

ism: Anthropological Perspectives. London

lishers.

- Hutt, M. 2003. Unbecoming Citizens: Culture,

(ENG -UI +ENG 4ERRACE 0ASIR 0ANJANG 3INGAPORE 4EL &AX % MAIL PUBSUNIT ISEAS EDU SG

- Eriksen, T.H. 1993. Ethnicity and National-

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Phillips.

- Dhakal, D.N.S. and C. Strawn. 1994. Bhutan:

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Himalayan Kingdom. Warminster: Aris and

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This census was followed by the introduction of Driglam Namzah, an ancient dress and language code of the Drukpa community, to promote a distinct Bhutanese national identity. This code stated that all Bhutanese citizens should wear national dress at all times. If found without national dress, a person would be penalised. Nepali language was discontinued from the school curriculum.

Two years later, in 1990, the government once again organised another south-only census. Those categorised as genuine Bhutanese citizens (F1) in the previous census were now put in

- Aris, M. 1970. Bhutan: the Early History of a

3OFT COVER 53

References

&2!-).' 4(% !3%!. #(!24%2 !N )3%!3 0ERSPECTIVE 2ODOLFO 3EVERINO COMPILER

Immediately after the citizenship cards were distributed, the government conducted a census confined to the south, which divided southern Bhutanese into seven categories: genuine Bhutanese citizens (F1); returned migrants, meaning people who had left Bhutan and then returned (F2); drop-outs, meaning people unavailable during the census-taking (F3); non-national women married to Bhutanese men (F4); non-national men married to Bhutanese women (F5); legally adopted children (F6); and migrants and illegal settlers (F7) (AI 1992: 5-6). The year of enactment of Bhutanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s first nationality law, 1958, was taken as the cut-off year to be recorded in the census as a genuine Bhutanese. The citizenship cards issued by1988 were no longer accepted in the south as proof of being Bhutanese. Genuine citizen, or F1 status required the submission of a 1958 tax receipt in either oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s own or an ancestorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s name, and convincing the census team that both of oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s parents were Bhutanese. If one could not show a 1958 tax receipt but could show receipts from both before and after the cut-off year, one was categorised F2 on the assumption that the person had left Bhutan during the interim. If the place of birth differed from a personâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s place of residence, a Certificate of Origin was required in addition to the 1958 tax receipt. In the end, the census reported that 100,000 illegal immigrants had flocked into southern Bhutan to take advantage of the countryâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s economic prosperity.

categories with fewer rights based on their Certificate of Origin; sometimes even members of the same family were placed in separate categories. As the census progressed, tensions mounted.

Bhutanese Nepalis demonstrated en masse to protest their treatment. The government responded by introducing the â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;No Objection Certificateâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;. Essential for an individual to conduct business and enrol his children in school, the certificate was issued only to individuals who, according to police records, had not taken part in the demonstration.

Police raids and intimidation increased throughout the south and by late 1990 Bhutanese Nepalis were being expelled or forced to flee to India. The Indian government provided them not with food and shelter but with transportation to Kakarbhitta, on the eastern border, where it told them to leave India and enter Nepal.

53

Population in the South. London: Amnesty

The coming crisis

After its initial policy of isolation, the government took measures to integrate Bhutanese Nepalis into mainstream Bhutanese culture. The first land reform programme was implemented in 1952 and allowed tenant farmers, most of whom were Bhutanese Nepalis, to acquire up to 25-30 acres (ibid: 128).

In 1958, the government ruled that citizenship could be obtained at birth if the father was a Bhutanese national, and that land-owning foreigners could obtain citizenship after having lived in Bhutan for ten years. Nepali culture and dress were officially recognised, the Nepali language was taught in schools and inter-ethnic marriage was encouraged. In 1980 the government introduced the national integration programme. Little information is available on what this programme entailed and it faded away without official explanation in the wake of a 1985 revision of the Citizenship Act. According to this act, citizenship could be obtained at birth only if both parents were Bhutanese, while a child of one Bhutanese parent could obtain citizenship only by proving 15 years of in-country residence. By

Rights Violations against the Nepali-speaking

1988, all Bhutanese deemed citizens had received their citizenship cards.

Despite the large number of Bhutanese Nepalis living in southern Bhutan, government policy in the mid-20th century was ambivalent. It isolated the Bhutanese Nepali by restricting their settlement to southern Bhutan (Rose, 1977: 47). Although this restriction was lifted in 1974 by the 43rd National Assembly (Thinley 1994: 55), geographical isolation (the south is separated from midmountain Bhutan by a 25-mile-wide forest belt) discouraged most Bhutanese Nepalis from moving farther north (Rose, 1977: 42). Both geographical circumstances and government policy helped maintain customs and practices, but also alienated immigrants from mainstream Bhutanese culture.

- Amnesty International. 1992. Bhutan: Human

25). It is likely that the first major migration from Nepal began after the AngloNepalese war of 1814-1816 (Regmi 1999). A century later British officers observed the Nepali presence in southern Bhutan: Bell mentioned in 1904 that the Nepalis might have migrated there many years earlier, and Captain Morris in 1933 believed that Nepali settlements had been there already for 60 or 70 years (Hutt, 2003: 41, 58).

> Research

Political turmoil in Cambodia Beginning in October 2005 a new campaign against Cambodia was launched in the international press. It alleged, as does much news from that country, heavy-handed repression and human rights violations by Prime Minister Hun Sen, citing, among other sources, Brad Adams – a prominent figure in the international NGO Human Rights Watch, which like all such self-defined organisations is assumed by the public to be defending the true and the good.

IIAS Newsletter | #41 | Summer 2006

Human Rights’. Phnom Penh Post 7/7.

1998. ‘From Info-Ed to the UN Center for

September 1977. See Vickery, M. 10-24 April

Studies, Australian National University.

6. Adams’s presentation to the Senate was 4

Social Change, Research School of Pacific

Canberra: The Department of Political and

Political Survey’, Discussion Paper No. 14.

nouk’s interference).

Michael Vickery is an independent scholar.

He was an IIAS fellow in 2005, and one of the speakers at the IIAS/ASiA ‘Nationalism in Mainland Southeast Asia’ workshop held in Amsterdam, 17 October 2005. vickery_michael@hotmail.com

5. See Vickery, Michael. 1994. ‘Cambodia: a

country’s borders’. Far Eastern Economic

Erosion, Cambodians question status of

d’Extrême-Orient, p.67.

4. Chanda, Nayan. 3 September 1992. ‘Land

du Mekong. Tome I. Paris: École Française

Eclair; Malleret, L. 1959. L’Archéologie du Delta

mise en valeur. Rennes: Imprimerie de l’Ouest

land border.

1978. Kampuchea Dossier I. Hanoi: Vietnam

in English by the government of Vietnam in:

October-3 November, 2005.

2. The 1967 border agreement was published

3. Delahaye, Victor. 1928. La plaine des joncs et sa

Why the fierce opposition to this important step in resolving the long festering wound in Cambodian-Vietnamese relations? And why the equally fierce reac-

… or regime change?

The 1967 declarations concerned only the

In 1985 demarcation was still not possible because of the ongoing armed hostilities between the Phnom Penh government and their US-China-ThaiWestern Europe-supported enemies: a tripartite coalition formed in 1982 and dominated by the surviving ‘Khmer Rouge’. Only after the October 1991 Paris Agreement was signed by the four Cambodian parties and 18 other countries did it become possible to again consider border questions. But article 2 of the Paris Agreement contained a provision causing further discord: ‘abolition of all treaties incompatible with sovereignty, independence, integrity, territorial inviolability, neutrality, and national union’. In the interpretation of the enemies of the Cambodian Peoples Party (CPP) government in Phnom Penh, this provision should have meant

Within the Cambodian political milieu, leading opposition politician Sam Rainsy, until his recent apology, chimed in continuously about Mr Hun Sen’s failure to preserve Cambodia’s integrity. Rainsy is supported by the American pseudoNGO, the International Republican Institute (IRI), a U.S. government-financed political lobby. In the Central American wars of the 1980s, the IRI supported the contras, including the Arena Party of El Salvador behind most of the death squads, and in 1993 the IRI brought a vice-president of that party to Cambodia to teach ‘democracy’ to Cambodian voters. IRI hatred of Mr Hun Sen and his government derives from Cambodia’s post-1979 friendship with Vietnam,

Paris: Éditions France-Empire, pp.168-170.

ignated according to a cart track, which deviate from one year to the next as a result of rain and the whims of local traffic. Some villagers may even have thought they lived in a different country than the one the map indicated. The recently signed supplementary treaty shows near successful completion of the task. Of seven remaining contentious points, some of which reflected real differences in the maps of the 1950s and 1960s, six, according to a Cambodian official involved, were settled by the end of 2005.

Jean. 1977. Cambodge du sourire à l’horreur.

decimal places in each direction, for 205 points. Comparison of the co-ordinates with available maps indicates that very few, and very minor changes to the old border were effected. Of course, those co-ordinates and the scales of the maps used (1:100,000 and 1:50,000) are only illustrative. Even the larger scale is hardly sufficient for measuring co-ordinates of three decimal places, and the border lines on the maps themselves may, according to scale, be several kilometres wide.

Demarcation on the ground is still necessary, and would require good will and a spirit of compromise from both sides.

Mom Sonando, the radio operator arrested for interviewing Sean Pengse, was responsible two years ago for inflammatory and inaccurate broadcasts that incited a crowd to set fire to the Thai embassy. Mr Hun Sen is obviously concerned about a repeat of that violence against the Vietnamese, which would be even more incendiary politically. The threat against the king’s cousin, and others, was also because they charged that the new treaty gave away territory to Vietnam. Thus, in this case, Mr Hun Sen can credibly argue that he is protecting national security and the domestic peace required to receive the international aid and foreign investment on which Cambodia depends. <

rière le sourire khmer. Paris: Plon (on Siha-

the UN-supervised 1993 election saddled Cambodia with a Bourbon restoration

Another inflammatory critic, Sean Pengse, director of the private Parisbased ‘Cambodia’s Border Committee’, and whose radio interview concerning the border was the reason for the arrest of the station’s operator, has falsified on his website the Khmer text of the 1979 treaty to read that the borders with Vietnam are to be ‘dissolved’, implicitly to integrate Cambodia into Vietnam, rather than ‘delimited’ or ‘delineated’ on the basis of the old border; this inflammatory text has already been propagated in a Khmer-language book in Cambodia. Probably, these critics of the new supplementary treaty care little about the text itself, unless they are concerned that if it does not prove to be a sell-out of Cambodian territory, it will remove a pretext for undermining Mr Hun Sen. They have rarely offered any specific details on territory they believe has been given to Vietnam.

brothers’. FEER; Meyer, Charles. 1971. Der-

Significant moments in the peace process involved organisations and persons still prominent in the latest anti-Phnom Penh furore. In 1990 Australian Foreign Minister Gareth Evans, now director of the International Crisis Group, devised a ‘peace plan’ which would have forced the Khmer Rouge back into the Cambodian government. In the same year Ms Sidney Jones, then of Asia Watch, now of the International Crisis Group, proposed the U.S. ‘Nicaragua Model’ (condemned on one count by the World Court) for Cambodia. Brad Adams of Human Rights Watch has meanwhile used his positions in human rights organisations to launch unwarranted attacks on the Cambodian government, to the extent of misleading the U.S. Senate in 1997 about the 1993 election and the formation of the new government.6 Whatever they really think about the treaties, they are happy to follow the Cambodian opposition in using them as tools against Mr Hun Sen.

which American reactionaries cannot forgive for its victory over the U.S.

Review; Chanda, N. 3 December 1992. ‘Blood

tion of Mr Hun Sen, which, predictably, has triggered counter-attacks from the human rights crowd? The problem goes back to the international ‘peace process’ of the 1980s, the goal of which was not democracy but rather the displacement of the post-1979 Cambodian government on the grounds that it had been set up by and was closely allied to Vietnam – no matter that it was a vast improvement over its predecessor. The UN-supervised 1993 election did not succeed in this goal of ‘regime change’, but saddled Cambodia with a ‘Bourbon restoration’ which has made good governance difficult.5

Courier, pp.123-4; and in French in: Morice,

The problem of demarcation on the ground remains. There is room for honest disagreement about precisely where the ‘existing’ border, recognised in 1967 and followed closely in the 1985 treaty, should be traced, as the post-1985 joint demarcation commission discovered.

Sometimes the agreed mapline cuts through a village, or an individual field, or even a temple, or the border is des-

were reported in Phnom Penh Post 14/21, 23

As much of the border was unmarked, it was often violated during the wartime conditions of the 1960s and 1970s. In 1967 the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) in the north and its southern ally, the National Liberation Front, accepted Cambodian Chief of State Prince Sihanouk’s request that foreign powers recognise Cambodia’s existing borders. They declared their recognition of ‘Cambodian territorial integrity within its existing borders’ and of ‘the existing frontiers between South Vietnam and Cambodia’.2 The U.S.-backed Republic of Vietnam in Saigon, however, did not promise such recognition.

The problem, which no one mentioned then, was that long stretches of the land border were nothing more than lines drawn on maps. In part of Kampuchea Krom, the ethnically and historically controversial region south of Saigon, the original French surveys had been

To this effect a series of treaties was signed: (1) in 1979 a Treaty of Peace, Friendship and Co-operation providing for negotiations to ‘delineate’ (or, using the French, ‘délimiter’) the border ‘on the basis of present border lines’; (2) in 1983 a ‘Treaty concerning principles for resolving border problems’ aimed to accept the border established at independence; (3) in 1985 a full new border treaty listed co-ordinates, with three

the king refused to sign the new border treaty,

The border itself has always been controversial. It was drawn in different areas at various times before Cambodian independence in 1953-54 by the French who, holding authority over both countries, considered the border a mere administrative division within French Indochina. With independence it became an international boundary, but some areas were ill-defined and never physically demarcated on the ground. The most controversial region is south of Saigon, now called Kampuchea Krom (‘lower Cambodia’) by Cambodians, including an area with an important ethnic Khmer population which some Cambodians consider was unjustly included within Vietnam and should be returned. Even those who do not take such an extreme view claim that the post-1979 government, led by former Cambodian communists with close ties to Vietnam, illegitimately drafted treaties that gave Vietnam even more territory.

Peace process…

The house-broken western press has consistently taken a position against the CPP and its treaties with Vietnam. One of its most respected, Nayan Chanda, showed his bias by uncritically accepting a U.S. State Department conclusion that ‘[a]fter comparing the [1985] delimitation with 1964 maps...with the exception of 1 km2 in one area that went to Cambodia, the agreement awarded “all the disputed areas, some 55 km2, to Vietnam”’. Given the scale of the maps and imprecision of the lines drawn, 55 km2 is insignificant and perhaps only a draftsman’s error. Moreover, it is known that maps of the 1960s had arbitrary and provocative borders drawn on Sihanouk’s orders.4

perhaps the monarchy should be abolished if

The disputed border

As long as the war continued, that is, until 1975, nothing could be done, even with the best intentions. From 1970 to 1975 the Khmer Republic government under General Lon Nol took the extreme position that Kampuchea Krom belonged to Cambodia, which put itself in opposition to both the DRV and the Republic in Saigon. But even after the war, from 1975 to 1979, Democratic Kampuchea (‘Khmer Rouge’) continued hostile relations with Vietnam with respect to the border. Only after good relations were established between Cambodia and Vietnam with the overthrow of the Khmer Rouge in early 1979 was it possible to seriously reconsider the border problem.

cousin of the king, and the suggestion that

t seems Mr Hun Sen, alleging defamation of himself and his government, ordered the arrest of an independent radio station operator, threatened to sue a cousin of the king for defamation, suggested abolishing the monarchy, and demanded from Thailand the extradition of two persons who had fled there to avoid arrest.1 Now all have been released or the charges against them dropped, while main opposition leader Sam Rainsy has apologised for related comments and returned to parliament in Phnom Penh. What was this all about? Not just human rights abuses, as slipshod journalists would have it.

Above all, it was about fierce opposition by the persons concerned to a new treaty signed by Cambodia and Vietnam pursuant to the demarcation of their common border. They went so far as to accuse Mr Hun Sen and his government of giving away territory to Vietnam – a sensitive accusation in Cambodia with the potential to lead to violence.

abolition of all treaties negotiated with Vietnam after 1979, though proponents of this view have failed to show how those treaties violated Cambodia’s sovereignty.

1. The threat against Sisowath Thomico, a distant

I

inaccurate, meaning that maps did not always correspond to distances on the ground.3

Notes

Michael Vickery

17

> Research

Photographing the Ogasawara Islands: thinking Early Japanese photography – like so many other elements of Japanese modernity – has often been considered a mere by-product of interaction between western technical know-how and traditional Japanese aesthetics. Academic approaches to understanding the photography of Meiji Japan (1868-1912) have likewise been hampered by what could be called an isolated aesthetics, where images are divorced from their social context even as they are mined for ‘evidence’ in what they purportedly tell us about Japanese history or customs.

Fig.1 - Kusakabe Kimbei, 641 Wisteria at Kameido, ca 1860-1900 Hand-tinted Albumin Print, 21.3 x 27cm Collection of Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution Views such as this beautifully coloured image of wisteria in bloom over a pond on the grounds of a Tokyo temple, with people standing on a gracefully arching bridge in the background, were mass produced and collected by tourists from all over the western world.

a discrete group in both subject matter and format and are an excellent example of early Japanese use of photography.

These images of First Settler subjects in carte de visite format (figure 2) are not duplicated in other collections, and no negatives appear to have survived; analysing them first requires an understanding of their photographic genre.

Patented in 1854 by the Parisian photographer André Disdéri, the carte de visite gained worldwide popularity in the last half of the 19th century. These ‘calling card’ photographs were albumin prints measuring 6cm x 10cm, pasted on cardboard and sold at inexpensive prices, which made mass production (and big profits) possible. Beginning in the 1860s, particularly in Europe and America, cartes de visite became a kind of social currency among members of the bourgeoisie (Poole 1997:109). Exchanged between friends and acquaintances, they were collectible and often arranged and captioned in albums. Images of famous people – royals, actors, politicians, war heroes – sold particularly well.

David Odo

F

urthermore, the focus of most research has been on one category of image – commercial tourist photography (figure 1) – thereby ignoring photographs produced for consumption within Japan. Much of this earlier work relentlessly pursued biographies of so-called master photographers, defined as such by the connoisseurship of collectors and dealers and the scholarship of academics and curators. One way to expand the discussion is to focus on images produced by photographers for the domestic (in other words, non-tourist) market, and to start to ‘think with’ these images to explore not only their historical and cultural contexts, but the role of the photographs themselves. Early Japanese photography of the previously uninhabited Ogasawara Islands, some 1,000km south of Tokyo in the Pacific, provides an interesting possibility for such exploration.

Formerly known as the Bonin Islands, the Ogasawara Islands are home to the descendants of a 19th century settlement of Americans, Europeans, Polynesians and Japanese. The original settlement party, organised under the auspices of the British consul in Hawaii, set sail from Honolulu in 1830 and formed the first permanent colony. It remained more or less independent until Japan’s colonial expedition to Ogasawara in 1875. After having satisfied several western governments that the rights of their citizens would be protected under its rule, Japan sent representatives of four ministries along with 13 settlers to Ogasawara aboard the warship Meiji Maru. By 1882 all non-Japanese Islanders were naturalized as Japanese citizens.

The islands’ photographic representation was integral to the expedition and exemplifies Japan’s use of photography as a bureaucratic and political tool in colonial expansion.1 Early government projects, such as photo-documenting the colonisation of Hokkaido in 1871 and conducting a photographic survey of ancient religious sites and cultural treasures in west18

IIAS Newsletter | #41 | Summer 2006

ern Japan in 1872, were intended to record and preserve, but what most influenced such projects was the growing belief that photography could record reality in unmediated terms.

The government further understood that the unlimited reproducibility of photographs made it possible to disseminate them as never before, providing an unprecedented opportunity to influence public knowledge.

Matsuzaki Shinji (1850-?), a commercially successful Tokyo photographer, was retained for the Ogasawara Expedition, the first time the government paid a photographer to work in such a capacity. He had served the previous year as the self-appointed, unpaid photographer of Japan’s failed 1874 attempt to take over Taiwan (then Formosa). Matsuzaki was contracted to produce 1,000 photographs and received permission to sell an unlimited number to the general public.

Relatively few of his Ogasawara images survive: the Tokyo National Museum, the National Archives, a private collection, and the Ogasawara Village Department of Education hold a total of 67 photographs.

Based on subject matter, Matsuzaki’s Ogasawara photographs can be divided into three categories: ‘landscape’, ‘Japanese’ and ‘First Settler’. Landscapes show only the ‘natural’ environment of the islands and attempt to exclude all evidence of human presence; Japanese photographs feature members of the Japanese expedition party or Japanese material culture; First Settler photographs capture the non-Japanese people who first settled the islands, their descendants or their material culture. These categories are not perfect – many images might fall somewhere in between – but they are a useful starting point in analysing the photographs as they provide a basis for understanding what the producers of the images deemed worth photographing.

Calling cards I am going to limit my discussion here to the 11 images held by the Ogasawara Village Department of Education; they form

The subjects of cartes de visite, however, were not exclusively the middle and upper classes of Europe and America. Human curiosities became a favourite subject; photographers travelled the colonised world to capture ‘native’ types, and at home sought photographs of urban and working class ‘others’. In contrast to the bourgeois carte de visite, in which individuals self-consciously presented themselves to the camera and participated in creating and circulating their photographs, ‘type’ photographs often used models and created an ‘aesthetics of the same’, wherein images of often (but not always) anonymous subjects were arranged in albums under headings such as ‘natives’, ‘peasants’ and other ‘exotics’ (Poole 1997:116,119).

‘Types’ were generally photographed in the controlled conditions of a studio. The bulky carte de visite camera, capable of taking multiple exposures on a single negative plate either through a system of multiple lenses that could be used separately or through a mechanism that rotated the plate, made the process efficient and cost-effective.2 The photographer usually posed the subject against a plain backdrop in an attempt to neutralise context.

Interpreting historical photographs requires situating them within the specific places they occupy within given genres.

Though often difficult (as here), photographs must also be examined within the realm of consumption – where their meaning is created. We can then probe the possible lives of the images, their original contexts and possible meanings.

The names of the subjects are not written on the Ogasawara cartes (the captions here are my own). Photographed alone or in groups of couples, children or families (figure 3), subjects are not posed against a neutral backdrop that strips away context, as is commonly seen in both studio and field carte de visite photographs of ‘types’. Some subjects are posed in front of a thatched dwelling. Others feature couples photographed in an open space with no readily identifiable cultural markers other than clothing (figure 4). Although they are identified by name in one of the larger photographs held in the national collections, the subjects in the photograph of the Bravo family (figure 5) are as anonymous as in the other cartes.

Although these photographs could easily be categorised as ‘repressive’ or ‘colonial’, nothing on the forensic level inherently exoticises or dehumanises their subjects. Without knowing the circumstances of production or the ways in which they were consumed, one might interpret many of these as

> Research

with 19th century photographs of Japan

Fig.3 - Matsuzaki Shinji, Portrait of Lesart Family, 1875

Fig.5 - Matsuzaki Shinji, Portrait of Bravo Family, 1875

Fig.2 - Matsuzaki Shinji, Portrait of a Family, 1875

equivalent to the bourgeois photographs taken in fashionable studios. Men, and almost all of the women, are dressed in European clothes; except for the rustic outdoor location, one could imagine that these photographs were produced for paying customers rather than a colonial government. However, whether the prints were sold commercially, archived by the government, or both, the subjects were clearly not the paying clients of the government-hired photographer.

rendering them inferior for viewing purposes. This is unlikely, however, since the government commissioned the photographs at great expense and would have expected Matsuzaki to produce a suitable product. Instead, their absence in the national collections might reflect the government’s fear that the Japanese claim to the islands could be challenged if the existence of citizens from western nations in Ogasawara became widely known.

Thinking about photographs

I propose rather that the original collector, Obana Sakusuke, used the cartes in his management of the colony. Even if the national government did not value them, Obana could have had Matsuzaki produce the cartes for use in his capacity as Ogasawara governor, not for any commercial interest but to study the First Settlers. Obana and other colonial bureaucrats might have used them in their detailed written records of each resident, which included names, ages, births, deaths and property. The cartes de visite read like a photographic inventory of the islands’ inhabitants, with each subject or group of subjects posed stiffly either in front of what is presumably his or her dwelling or in a wild, open space. Although the subjects’ names were not recorded on the cartes themselves (other photographs included the name of the male household head), in conjunction with written records they would likely have been useful to the colonial administration.

What can we say about the consumption of the photographs?

Although produced under the same circumstances as the photographs held in the national collections, these cartes de visite followed a disappearing trajectory. By this I do not mean the actual 11 cartes in the village’s collection, for their biographies are relatively well understood. The photographs themselves were in the private collection of Obana Sakusuke, the first colonial governor of Ogasawara and the official responsible for retaining Matsuzaki’s services for the expedition. Obana was personally interested in photography and deeply involved in the colonisation of the Ogasawara Islands (Morita 2002).

His papers (including photographs) were eventually archived by the Tokyo Metropolitan government, which in turn deposited them with Ogasawara’s Department of Education. It is unclear, however, whether additional prints of the cartes were originally archived with the other expedition photographs that now form the national collections, or whether they were indeed never included with the other photographs.

Because Matsuzaki’s subjects were not bourgeois customers paying for studio portraits, it is tempting to assume that the colonial photographer produced images of an exotic other for government and possibly Japanese public consumption; that individuals could order a set of the photographs and arrange them in their own albums; and that the photographs might have been collected together with others of ‘internal exotics’, such as Ainu or Okinawans, with collectors adding their own caption to explain the ‘Ogasawara type’. But no such album has ever been found, and no concrete evidence exists of commercial consumption of the cartes de visite, as opposed to the other photographs, which were advertised for sale at the time of production and subsequently found in a commercially obtained collection.

‘Thinking with’ the photographs in this way – thinking, that is, beyond the content and subject matter of the images in order to consider issues of form and function – expands the discussion about early Japanese photography. It allows one to consider larger social contexts as well as the role of the photographs themselves, and addresses what is often missing from scholarship on early Japanese photography: the agency of Japanese actors and the importance of Japanese institutions in shaping early photographic practice in Japan. <

For further reading - Edwards, Elizabeth. 2001. Raw Histories: Photographs, Anthropology and Museums, Materializing Culture. Oxford: Berg.

- Phillips, Sandra S. 1996. Crossing the Frontier: Photographs of the Developing West, 1849 to the Present. San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Notes 1. Photography had been part of European colonial projects since almost immediately after its invention in 1839 (Ryan 1997:28). In the United States, the government enlisted photographers to document and justify its westward expansion (Phillips 1996).

2. It is unlikely that Matsuzaki carried the cumbersome carte de visite

- Pinney, Christopher. 1997. Camera Indica: the Social Life of Indian Photographs. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

- Poole, Deborah. 1997. Vision, Race, and Modernity: a Visual Economy of the Andean Image World. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

- Ryan, James R. 1997. Picturing Empire: Photography and the Visualization of the British Empire. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

camera in addition to his standard camera in the field. Judging by the images, which show less clarity than the larger albumen prints,

All this makes one wonder if the government considered the cartes unworthy of archiving, perhaps because their smaller image size lacked the clarity of the larger-sized photographs,

Fig.4 - Matsuzaki Shinji, ­Portrait of Couple, 1875

he probably exposed the negatives in his standard camera, made standard albumen contact prints and copied these with a carte de visite camera when he returned to his studio in Tokyo.

David Odo is Postdoctoral Fellow at the Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C. He was a fellow at IIAS in 2005. kopepe@gmail.com

IIAS Newsletter | #41 | Summer 2006

19

> Review

British imperial collapse in Asia Bayly, Christopher and Tim Harper. 2005. Forgotten Armies: The Fall of British Asia, 1941-45. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 616 pages, ISBN 0 6740 2219 X Bali Sahota

I

n all but mainstream and military forms of modern historiography, the world wars of the 20th century often simply mark the end of one period or, like the capital letter of a sentence, establish the syntax for the following one. Political pressures of an era come to a head; the pieces, afterwards, fall in newly determined patterns. In Forgotten Armies, a masterful reconstruction of the collapse of British Asia during the war years, Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper reveal at once the mundane and sublime qualities of all-out modern warfare.

Considering issues such as mass casualties, genocide and the dropping of the atomic bomb, the representational constraints of the historical discipline are made apparent. More modernist genres arguably have greater flexibility for dealing with events of this intensity.1 In any case, only an Olympian calm of distanced irony could convert the terrifying spectacle and chaos of modern warfare into something historically explicable.

How, then, can the exceptional conditions of world war, the totality of the event and its violence be referenced in a representational mode that must reduce everything to normality in order to narrate it? In rethinking the oblivion of the second world war’s eastern front, Forgotten Armies answers this question using archival fragments in most telling ways.

The sublimity of the event surfaces unexpectedly in Forgotten Armies. It is the uncanny moment or the absurd

juxtaposition captured, for example, by descriptions of ‘ever-present gorgeous butterflies’ that would settle ‘on people near to death’ in ‘the green hell of mud, human excrement and chaos’ of the Hukawng valley in 1942; (pp.183, 185) or of the ‘glorious ochre sunsets’ produced by the smoke of fires set by arsonists in Rangoon after the Japanese invasion (p.62). Sublimity surfaces as well in brutal ironies. In the year after the great artificial famine of Bengal in 1943, agricultural production broke previous records, but because of the famine, not enough labouring hands were still alive to harvest it. Juxtapositions evoke the vast disturbance of war. The explosion of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima produces in the words of Matsushige Yoshito ‘a brilliant flash of immaculate white’ (p.456). Destiny as black humour and aesthetic recompense for human horror: in Forgotten Armies these are the themes that bring into scope the unrepresentable enormity of the second world war. It is as if all the evil and terror come of nothing other than the stupidity of human designs for power and domination, as if the world is one vast board game upon which human folly and the struggle against fate is the source of delight for ancient gods.

Forgotten Armies’s return to narrative history in the grand tradition seems to return the reader to a chronotope of the ancient world itself.

Each of the chapters of Forgotten Armies chronicles a year of the war, revealing the precipitous breakdown of British rule. All kinds of contingencies and circumstances slowly bring into focus a new order and geographical imaginary.

It was perhaps inevitable that Japanese imperial ambitions, known benignly as the ‘Greater East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere’, would target the great crescent stretching from Bengal to Sumatra.

As the powers of the late imperial age were well aware, the region was rich in resources, the seat of weakly protected cosmopolitan metropolises such as Singapore, and the base of modernizing urban and peasant labour forces.

At the moment when Japanese imperialists were strategizing, the idea of national liberation and politics based on ascriptive affinities had already spread with severe consequences. Between the struggles of Japanese and western imperial powers emerge the forgotten armies. Their fleeting appearance and the telling of their histories serve the purpose of the book: to get beyond the micro-specialisations of contemporary historiography and to rethink the fragmented nature of public memory surrounding the great events of the second world war, ‘to reassemble and reunite the different, often unfamiliar but connected narratives of these epic events and to put the stories of the great men and the great battles of the period into the context of the histories of ordinary Asian men and women’ (p.xxxii).

The forgotten ones The diversity of the forgotten armies reveals the inter-twined nature of the great crescent: its kaleidoscopic societies are not only tied to one another, but also to broad national and imperial formations around the world. The men of the Indian diaspora, who joined the Indian National Army to escape Japanese labour camps, appear here, as do

the members of the Singapore Overseas Chinese Volunteer Army under the leadership of the business tycoon Tan Kah Lee. Likewise, different tribal groups such as the Nagas of Assam, essential to Allied victory, make their appearance, as do the Orang Asli who helped to establish the ephemeral communist hegemony in Malay.

Yet, Bayly and Harper capture with their heuristic category some rather unexpected units of oblivion’s armies, including the huge ‘silent armies’ of officially commissioned Japanese ‘comfort women’. These sex slaves were dispatched with colonising missions at the ratio of one for every 40 soldiers, along with over 32.1 million condoms. We also have the abandoned lepers of Sungei Buloh who established ‘a centre of support for guerrilla resistance to the Japanese’ (p.125). Most surprising, the 70,000 or so Japanese soldiers who withered away in the valleys around Assam after the legendary battles of Imphal and Kohima are mentioned briefly as one of the forgotten armies.

They, too, despite being the invaders, are among the forgotten figures buried in the soil of the great crescent, abandoned as the lost subjects of an increasingly improbable empire. One gets a sense in instances such as these of how much Forgotten Armies departs from more conventional nationalist or ethnically motivated accounts of the region’s history. The complex detritus embedded in the very land surely make problematic the claims of the region’s nationalist – or fascist – ideologies concerning the purities of

blood and soil. Such claims continue to hold sway in the official histories of the region.

The mosaic that accordingly emerges of the war years through the device of the ‘forgotten armies’ is one that is radically de-centring. It produces the right juxtapositions for making the age come across as quintessentially modern and global. This is accomplished primarily by the sources Bayly and Harper bring to their disposal. Gleanings from the numerous archives of several nation-states, the major newspapers of the region, photographs and the personal accounts of all kinds of people make for a strikingly authentic account. Building almost exclusively on primary sources, the account gives a sense of the age as it was considered by its contemporaries. These were the days when the Malayan Planning Unit was concocting elaborate war strategies ‘in almost complete ignorance of the situation on the ground’, when Lord Mountbatten was dreaming up fantastic invasion schemes called ‘Dracula’ or ‘Zipper’ and officials such as the exiled Governor General Reginald Dorman-Smith were engaged in debates where the basic premise was that ‘the British Empire in Asia would be rebuilt as surely as day followed night’ (pp.420, 241). The manner in which local figures were strategically engaging with the blindness of British ideology was essential. The shadowy figure ‘Lai Teck’, the best-known alias of the man who climbed the ranks to become secretary general of the Malayan Communist Party and erstwhile spy for the British, only makes

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IIAS Newsletter | #41 | Summer 2006

Gulati is a talented filmmaker and the acceptance of her film to a sold-out audience at the Margaret Mead Film Festival vouches for that. Nalini by Day, Nancy by Night has a well-crafted and cleverly structured narrative using ingredients of cinema verité, archival footage, animation, and text. Her weaving together of these ingredients results in a cohesive patchwork design where the stitching is invisible. The cinema verité footage serves as a peek inside call centers during a typical work schedule that

How did it all begin? Gulati: ‘This was three years ago when one didn’t know as much about outsourcing of telemarketing jobs. I found myself wanting to talk to Harry’ (a telemarketer calling her from New Delhi, the city where she grew up). She was surprised that he got her name right and was calling her from across the Atlantic, from New Delhi in particular. The phone call by ‘Harry’ intrigued Gulati so much that she decided to take a trip back home in 2003 to ‘enter the world of call centers and language institutes where telemarketers acquire American names and accents to service the telephone-support industry of the US.’ Says Gulati, ‘It was an eye-opening experience for me and made me question my preconceptions. I really thought I was going to experience walking into a sweatshoplike environment.’ It was, however, not just a phone call from a telemarketer named Harry that made her pack her bags; it was her relationship with her subjects that made her pick up the camera. She sums it up beautifully in the film when she says, ‘Here I was, an Indian living in America with an Indian name and accent, seeing other Indians living in India with American names and accents. Ironically, we were all living as per Eastern Standard Time’.

Nalini by Day, Nancy by Night is a documentary film on the outsourcing of American jobs to India. Told from the perspective of an Indian living in the US, the film offers a unique point of view as it journeys into India’s call centers. Gulati, who teaches 16mm film production and experimental filmmaking at Virginia Commonwealth University, has developed a new language and style within the genre of documentary filmmaking, breaking conventions of editing by including footage one would normally leave out. It is a clever technique that makes the process transparent, showing us that while this a documentary we’re watching, the characters are really performing for the camera, thereby raising questions of the ‘document’ itself. Gulati refers to this as showing the ‘manufacturing’ as opposed to the ‘manufactured’. She uses a personal narrative in the form of a diary/travelogue to delve into the larger sociocultural landscape of globalization and identity politics.

Nalini by Day, Nancy by Night, the award-winning documentary film by Sonali Gulati, was screened at the 29th Annual Margaret Mead Film Festival at the American Natural History Museum in November 2005. The Margaret Mead Film Festival is the longest-running showcase for international documentaries in the US and is known for its outstanding selection of titles on challenging subjects. In January 2006, the documentary won a Director’s Choice Award from the Black Maria Film and Video Festival. It will be touring nationally in the US this year.

Maya Kulkarni

Sonali Gulati, writer, director, producer. 2005. Nalini by Day, Nancy by Night. India/US, Hindi/English, 27 min documentary film.

Nalini by day, Nancy by night

> Review

To the professional assassin

Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

2. As quoted in ‘The Politics of Historical Interpretation: Discipline and De-Sublimation’. Ibid., p.69.

Bali Sahota is a research associate at the Department of Asian Languages and Literatures at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. sahota@umn.edu

From its source; how many times Have I whispered; real talent Is needed for murder; It is not easy at all To commit a neat murder The dead can jump out of graves On rare mornings Some light is needed; As human sight is not powerul Like the eys of a cat. from Sarker Amin, What my name is!

Translated by Razia Khan and M. Harunir Rashid Dhaka: DROUPODI, 2002

IIAS Newsletter | #41 | Summer 2006

Maya Kulkarni South Asian Women’s NETwork maiakulkarni@yahoo.com

1. White, Hayden. 1987. The Content of the

A mountain, to erase a river

Gulati’s latest film Nalini by Day, Nancy by Night is a documentary worth watching. The film is witty and humorous with a serious heart on a subject of global importance that will keep you laughing all the way home and thinking thereafter. If you see this film, you’ll know why Gulati is a filmmaker to watch out for. <

Notes

It is possible to throw down

Sonali Gulati continues to be interested in the subject of identity. Her first film Sum Total addresses gender and sexuality while Barefeet addresses diasporic and transnational identity.

Before starting a film, Gulati always asks herself two questions: Why this film? And why am I making it? Clearly, the responses to these questions create close ties between the film and the filmmaker. For someone who believes that the personal is political, such critical introspection comes as no surprise.

Destruction can thus be productive. The exceptional circumstances of modern warfare can potentially help bring into focus the seething struggles, unsettled

disputes and unresolved contests over power that endure quietly under normal conditions. The aftermath of explosions across a vast terrain leave the possibility for realignments of geo-political boundaries, the invention of nations and the formation of new regional blocs.

Underneath the scorched remains, the ramshackle re-adjustment to normality and the refurbishing of historical trajectory lie the memories of vastly discrepant, yet interconnected, experiences. Such remains can be unearthed to reveal profound moments pregnant with possibility. Bayly and Harper are like archaeologists digging into the historical record to bring scraps back from oblivion and reassemble them in ways that may shed light on and enhance the meaning of our present. One issue that certainly comes to light is the potential discrepancy between the way the past is officially commemorated and the different ways it can be recollected in regions as diversely populated – in the past and in the present – in what we today call ‘Southeast Asia’. <

Nalini by Day, Nancy by Night starts and ends with animation using a black and white palette that resonates with the archival footage in the film. It forms a nice balance between the humorous and satirical animation and serious and factual archival imagery. The film is a refreshing concoction of documentary and fiction that has ‘text’ starring as its own character. The ‘fictitious’ re-enacted phone calls from telemarketers in the opening animation might be scripted but is based on ‘real life’ accounts that the filmmaker has experienced.

The fruit of long and arduous archival labour, Forgotten Armies is an achievement that helps one rethink broad subjects such as modernity and modern warfare. It is also a great example of the theory of nationalism and regionalism that Bayly has previously published.

According to him, geo-political formations in modern times are born through the crucible of war. The vast transformation that was the second world war can be seen to have produced the region we understand today as Southeast Asia.

The very term ‘Southeast Asia’ was coined only after ‘the whole area from the borders of Bengal and Assam almost as far as the Australian Sea was united by the Allies for the first and only time in a single, interconnected administration’ (p.xxxii). The seeds of a new order were being planted amidst the mayhem.

Thus the vast cosmopolitan perspective that they bring to their narrative reveals ‘the terrifying spectacle of change which destroys everything and creates it anew, and destroys again’, which was central to Friedrich von Schiller’s notion of the historical sublime.2

The film paints a complex picture with snippets of history that date back to the first telephone call made via satellite, subtly hinting at the threat technological advancements make to all jobs, not just call center jobs. It serves as a gentle reminder to the changes we accept around us every day – from automatic toll collection machines on highways to self-check-in airline counters to self-check-out grocery cashier stations. It also reminds us that we are too quick to point fingers at cheaper labour in developing countries taking away American jobs.

The film also poses more questions than it answers; half way through the film, Gulati asks a former call center employee: Who benefits? A question she says she learned to ask as a Critical Social Thought major, a question that highlights the politics behind the film and prods at the larger sociological issue of the distribution of power.

starts late at night and runs to early morning. Gulati’s unique style of storytelling simultaneously uses and defies documentary conventions – the film incorporates ‘traditional’ style interviews but the camera keeps rolling even when a phone call interrupts the session and the interviewee lets us know that Gulati’s next subject is waiting in the room next door.

The book’s unusual picture of the modern experience can be considered the result of its shifting the narrative of the second world war from the western to the eastern front and from the sphere of officialdom to the translocal worlds of the forgotten armies. Combinations of the most discrepant phenomena seem to have characterized the era, and in bringing them to light Bayly and Harper verge on the fantastic in their depictions. The non-western world of the mid-20th century is one of bizarre bricolage. We see animal-based armies alongside state-ofthe-art war machines and we witness how the ‘most advanced scientific techniques of killing were deployed alongside almost medieval patterns of bravery and brutality’ (p.393). The notion of a ‘triumph of the will’ was strong among many fighting forces and Emperor Hirohito ‘still believed that the Allies could be denied victory if his samurai were brave enough’ (p.393). The most technologically advanced instruments of destruction were employed by the likes of kamikaze bombers who espoused quasi-ancient ideologies of sacrifice. The

techniques for expressing domination also seem to be of a strangely pre-modern sort. The Japanese probably incited the most hatred and spurred anti-imperial struggle with their notorious habit of face-slapping. The newly re-colonized subjects of Burma and Malay found this to be the most intolerable aspect of their subjection.

The theme of globalization is apparent in the film, but the subtlety with which Gulati approaches the issue of identity intrigues. At one point, she drops in at a call center job interview where the interviewee is asked to describe the last movie he saw. He begins to narrate the plot of a major Hollywood blockbuster titled Face Off. ‘In that film, there are two main characters, Nicolas Cage and John Travolta…they change their faces and no one knows which is the real one.’ The resonance of his response with the subject of identity (Indian call center employees posing as Americans) seems too uncanny.

sense ‘in the context of the fluidity of the social world he inhabited, a world where most people were strangers’ (p.55). Such characters abound in the scenarios of Forgotten Armies, where the minor and ghostly presence of the commoner reveals itself to be just as significant as that of a British official, where reversals of power are quite regular. The book’s excellent organisation, including several maps, a list of key characters and an extensive index, help the reader sort through any difficulties in keeping track of them.

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> Review

Beyond state and nation in South Asia van Schendel, Willem. 2005. The Bengal Borderland: Beyond State and Nation in South Asia. London: Anthem Press, 429 pages, maps, illustrations. ISBN 1 84331 145 3 Hastings Donnan

T

he last decade has seen an outpouring of work on state borders and a dramatic increase in the number of research centres, summer schools and conferences devoted to their study. Borders offer an exciting and intellectually productive meeting place for political scientists, sociologists, historians, geographers and anthropologists, among others, from which to view nations, national identities and the state. ‘Borders’ have increasingly entered wider social theory as a metaphor for social relations in a globalised world where boundaries of all kinds – of culture, class, gender and sexuality as well as those of state sovereignty – are being challenged and transformed, are breaking down or being reaffirmed. What is striking about this emerging body of work is how much of it is focused on the borderlands of Europe and Mexico-USA, with only a scattering of texts informed by comparative materials from borders elsewhere. South Asia, it seems, has been especially neglected.

The Bengal Borderland is thus to be welcomed for its fascinating and insightful account of a border region long overlooked as a site for empirical study. The Indian subcontinent’s partition in 1947 ended a long period of colonial rule, but as this book makes clear, it initiated a lengthy period of boundary-making between the states that came into being at midnight on that August night, a process that nearly 60 years later leaves issues to be resolved. That so much of the Bengal border remained undetermined for so long is just one of the many surprises in van Schendel’s book, which unseats a number of longstanding assumptions about the region: that the boundary separated Hindu from Muslim, that it bordered Muslim majority areas, and that it bisected Bengal. The story is both more complex and interesting than such assumptions suggest, as van Schendel elaborates in his account of Rad-

cliffe’s Boundary Commission and the difficulties of fixing a boundary dominated by rivers (over 1,000 kms of the borderline runs through water) and where much of the territory was unsurveyed. The result, as he puts it, was ‘a wacky zigzag’ patchwork (p.54) that cross-cut historic ties of kinship, commerce and communication. People had to learn how to live with an international border where previously there had been none; at first some were not even sure on which side they were. It was as if geography and social networks conspired against state efforts to impose its territorial imprint.

The book explores the outcome of this tension between the realities of daily life along the border and state attempts to bound space as a mark of sovereignty, and the chapters variously consider issues of security, resistance, migration, trade and violence. Like many borders, the Bengal borderland is a zone characterised by varying degrees of state accommodation and subversion, and it too has its cast of smugglers, bandits, corrupt border guards and separatist militants with ties to rival states. Many contradictions and anomalies arose: how to curb smuggling while facilitating economic exchange, the blurring of legal and illegal trade, the overnight conversion of commuters into international migrants. In one case, a man crossed the international boundary every time he moved from one room in his home to another (p.214). Throughout the book, van Schendel reveals the inability of the state to contain its population and economy, how border fencing, checkpoints and deportations were often more effective as elaborate aesthetic displays that symbolically enacted the inviolability of the state than as effective means of protecting it. In many instances, he argues, local notions of territorial continuity conflicted with state concepts of territorial discontinuity as borderlanders doggedly flouted attempts to limit their conceptual and material horizons in an effort simply to get on with their lives.

This book thus does much more than fill a gap in our knowledge about the region, for it invites us to rethink the partition of British India from a borderland perspective and to re-examine a territorial and statist epistemology that is ill-equipped to understand global restructuring. It seems that states have been slow to think globally and transnationally, or at least slower than the many borderlanders who have ‘jumped scale’ and have transcended the sovereign and territorial constraints of the state in pursuit of better lives, commercial gain, political advantage, and self-determination. Social scientists too must go beyond the classic focus on nation and state, and must reconceptualise social space in a way that does not just advocate a post-territorial geography of networks and flows, but which grapples with how space has been reimagined and re-scaled. Borders, van Schendel contends, are the perfect sites for such study, for it is here that various imaginings of scale (such as the national, global, and state) meet and converge.

The combination of scrupulous archival research and sensitive ethnographically-informed interviews makes The Bengal Borderland a gripping human tale of what boundary formation meant (and means) for those whose daily lives were (and are) most directly affected. Drawing extensively on the borderlanders’ own voices and experiences, and with many photographs, it paints a wonderfully rich and evocative portrait of more than half a century of Bengal border life. To those US and European borders so long considered paradigmatic in the field, the author has added a border study of enormous significance and one which border scholars everywhere should sit up and take note of. < Hastings Donnan School of History and Anthropology Queen’s University Belfast h.donnan@qub.ac.uk

[ a d v e r t i s e m e n t ]

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IIAS Newsletter | #41 | Summer 2006

Kjeld Erik Brødsgaard The Fifth Plenary Session: A Note on Recent Policy Initiatives and China's 11th Five-Year Plan

Søren Clausen Chairman Mao, The Chinese Revolution, and the Banality of Evil: Reflections on the State of the Field in Mao Studies

Special Issue: Democracy without Opposition: Managing Political Risks in Singapore Guest Editors: Cang-Seng Ooi and James Gomez

23•2006 (forthcoming)

IIAS Newsletter | #41 | Summer 2006

Elisabeth Lund Engebretsen is a PhD student in anthropology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her current research focuses on emerging lesbian cultures and wider social changes relating to gender, sexuality, social relationships and subjectivity in Beijing.

E.Engebretsen@lse.ac.uk

Karin Buhmann Corporate Social Responsibility in China: Current Issues and Their Relevance for Implementation of Law

While it clearly borrowed the symbolic hierarchical structure to denote social relationships from traditional family compounds, the danwei space ‘was designed to represent the centrality of collective labour and egalitarian social relationships that exemplified the socialist ideal’ (p.125). The symbolic spatial order was reversed: the most revered space was the area visible and accessible to the masses, the courtyard opposite the entrance gate, while in the Confucian family household it was where the patriarch resided, tucked inside the central building.

Tel: (45) 3815 2509 · Fax: (45) 3815 2500 E-mail: cjas.int@cbs.dk · Website: www.cbs.dk/cjas James Falkin The Renewal of Chinese Marxism: Debates over the Character of the Political Economy

In the Republican era Confucian norms were redeployed, albeit in new forms, in all sectors of the industrialising workforce. Nativeplace artisan guilds and other groups that modelled themselves on the structures and hierarchical relationships of the kinship system emerged, thereby facilitating practical workplace organisation as well as providing safety, welfare support and a surrogate family network for workers coming to the cities without their own family. Bray thus counters much western scholarship on modernity, which is often blind to cultural and historical context and argues that the shift to industrialised, urban modernity necessitates the emergence of an individualised, fragmented social persona. This was far from the case in modernising urban China, although the context and meaning of the Confucian collective

The Copenhagen Journal of Asian Studies Asia Research Centre Copenhagen Business School Porcelænshaven 24 · DK-2000 Frederiksberg · Denmark

22•2005

Based on a wide range of Chinese and western interdisciplinary scholarship, Bray’s analysis critiques the often-applied totalising party/state-centred analysis of social phenomena and institutional practices, which approached the danwei as a functional extension – negative in its emphasis on control and containment – of the Communist government. Contrary to this tradition, Bray’s interpretive approach defines walls as ‘positive technologies productive of particular relations of spatial practice’ (p.20), and the danwei as a realm of knowledge production. Bray draws on Henri Lefebvre’s spatial analyses that emphasize not only physical space but also the imaginative and theoretical processes involved in thinking about and planning space.

David E. Apter Bearing Witness: Maoism as Religion

The wall

[ a d v e r t i s e m e n t ]

Social Space and Governance in Urban China is a fascinating probe into the origins of the socio-spatial form of urban planning and governance embodied in the danwei; Bray’s analysis is thought-provoking and a welcome contribution to existing scholarship. The analysis could have benefited from closer attention to the concept and role of the state, which Bray addresses only briefly. Considerations of how what goes on outside walls informs what goes on within them, and of the relationships between neighbouring danwei, may also have enlightened. Nevertheless, for anyone interested in Chinese culture and history, this study is a highly insightful read and an important contribution to current debates on the complex interconnections between modernity, space and social change. <

For further information on subscription or submission of papers, please contact the Editorial Office.

The new unit of urban housing development emerging in the late 1980s, the xiaoqu (small district), exhibits many similar features to the danwei, such as internal communal self-reliance. But they are usually not connected to a workplace and residence in the xiaoqu is based on choice and the ability to pay for your home; thus income disparity and social networking rather than work and career-based connections emerge as the main catalysts for social relations. Bray suggests, however, that while market transition and reform have undoubtedly changed the urban landscape and social structures, the principle of enclosed communal living remains fundamental.

With the socio-economic changes of the last two decades, the danwei has declined in importance and function. The locus of urban life has shifted to the streets, private enterprises and commercial shopping centres. Workers’ day-to-day existence, once ‘dominated by collectivized labour and communal consumption within the danwei compound…is now increasingly structured by an ethos of commodification and individual consumption...’ (p.191).

Danwei decline

New — now also available on-line

After 1949, Chinese planning of the urban environment, with the danwei as its core constituent, radically transformed the socio-spatial landscape. While aspects of social organisation retained a collectiveoriented ethos derived from Confucian cosmology and socialist principles, the spatial logic that informed the building of the socialist Chinese city derived from a complex origin of European and Soviet urban planning theory. At its core was a theory born of the demands presented by urbanisation and population growth spawned by early industrialisation: better governance – including the socialist transformation of society. Economies were based on regulation of the urban environment. Principles based on Soviet-style communes, desirable for their economised and standardised design, were applied to the Chinese socialist project after 1949.

Chinese socialist governmentality developed during the Yan’an period, according to Bray, when the Communist party consolidated its powerbase in rural north-west China. The ‘mass line’ theory of revolutionary leadership and operational strategy, encouraged by financial and military necessity, advocated mobilisation of the grassroots with a minimum central input of resources. This contributed to the Communists developing production-oriented and largely self-sufficient localities based on the principles of the Confucian socio-spatial system but within a socialist ethos of a different sort of family: the socialist commune, and by extension, the Communist republic.

Danwei and communism

social logic did transform to accommodate the changing society.

The Copenhagen Journal of Asian Studies is a leading Scandinavian journal on contemporary Asia. CJAS publishes refereed research and review articles in the fields of international business, politics, economics, society, law, culture and international relations in Asia. Previously published by the University of Copenhagen, CJAS is published as a biannual publication of the Asia Research Centre, Copenhagen Business School. The editor is Professor Kjeld Erik Brødsgaard, Copenhagen Business School.

In traditional China (before 1911), walled cities (the realm of the imperial government) and household compounds (the Confucian family sphere) were the most significant spatial realms in terms of social and political organisation. These structures and socio-spatial interrelationships reflected and reproduced roles and positions within a hierarchy of social relationships congruent to Confucian-based cosmology. For example, the family patriarch lived in the centre building inside a family compound, with family members staying in visible realms around the courtyard in accordance with their ascribed roles within the family hierarchy.

In this way the spaces within walled cities and family households policed and reproduced certain types of subjects based on a collective-oriented cultural cosmology.

Danwei space, Bray argues, is not merely an institutional formation that put Communist governing ideals into practice through mass mobilisation, socialist education and industrial production. The danwei also harbours collective groups and social relationships centred on work and production and extending to living spaces, everyday practices and collective notions of identity (collective subjectivity). The dynamic relationship between structure, ideology and everyday social practices created the foundation for what became the Communist danwei and was, as Bray shows, often fuelled just as much by ad hoc local circumstances as by governmental planning and intervention.

Copenhagen Journal ofAsian Studies

The danwei emerged as the ‘predominant urban spatial form’ during a period of major construction and industrialisation in the 1950s. A walled compound holding anywhere from a few households to thousands of people, the danwei was the combined home and workplace and functioned as a self-sufficient and cohesive unit. Bray builds on Foucauldian genealogical methodology to analyse the danwei as a Chinese-specific socialist form of state and government – in terms of power, subjectivity, space and the operational principles of government (governmentality). By exploring the multiple and complex sources of influences that enable the formation of the archetypal danwei, he seeks to understand how the ‘political and economic strategies of government in China have impinged upon the everyday lives of the urban population’ (p.1).

alls have been integral to social and spatial organisation throughout Chinese history – the Great Wall, walled cities and traditional Confucian courtyard houses are good examples. David Bray’s study traces the origins, development and reform of a distinctive modern type of enclosed compound structure in urban socialist China – the danwei (work unit) – and addresses common conceptions about modernity, identity and the links between socio-spatial arrangements, political ideologies and governance.

W

Elisabeth Lund Engebretsen

Bray, David. 2005. Social Space and Governance in Urban China: The Danwei System From Origins to Reform.

Stanford: Stanford University Press. 277 pp. ISBN 0-8047-5038-6

Social space and governance in urban China

> Review [ a d v e r t i s e m e n t ]

The

A semi-annual journal dedicated to the study and preservation of Asian traditions

This year’s issues include articles on: * On the Wings of a Bird: Folklore and Nostalgia * Pipit Rochijat’s Subversive Mythologies * Homo narrans in East Java * Hairstyles in Korea and Japan * Special Issue: Animal Folklore

Subscription rates for two issues/year: Institutions us $40.00, Individuals us $22.00 Contact address: Editor, Asian Folklore Studies, Nanzan University 18 Yamazato-cho, Showa-ku, 466–8673 Nagoya, Japan e-mail: nuai@ic.nanzan-u.ac.jp

23

> Review

Southeast Asia: one or many?

Owen, Norman G., ed. 2005. The Emergence of Modern Southeast Asia. A New History. University of Hawai’i Press, 541 pages. ISBN 0-8248-2890-9

riting a history of Southeast Asia is a daunting task – the heterogeneity of the region is at odds with broad historical generalization. The authors of this book, eight scholars from the United States and Australia, hedge their bets from the outset. Theirs is not an attempt to provide a single narrative of the region’s history. Instead, their book offers the reader a historical menu comprised of five courses, ranging from the early 18th to the last half of the 20th century. It is organised around general chapters that provide synoptic analyses on historical transformations across the region and chronologically structured country-specific chapters. A reader may opt to read the book from beginning to end, but he could as well limit his attention to the thematic chapters or the history of one country.

provides a valuable study for exploring the region’s history. In this, it is particularly useful in alerting its audience – students of the region and the generally interested reader – to the fallacies of focusing excessively on a distinctive set of long- or short-term variables in explaining historical processes and outcomes. The authors leave no doubt that analytical categories such as colonialism, capitalism, nationalism, industrialization, religion and demography play crucial roles in defining social actors’ interests and actions or, as historical forces, serve to explain why political, economic or social change occurs at a particular moment in time.

Yet, by exposing how history is always driven by a confluence of factors –big and small, some predictable, some unexpected – they also demonstrate the limits of any attempt to put history into a single interpretative framework.

The result is a book that does less well in telling a coherent story, but one that

This book is a precious case of analytical modesty. Since our understanding

Marcus von Essen

W

of history inevitably shapes our thinking of the present and the future, this is not a minor contribution. What is revealing is how often western observers, social scientists, Asian strongmen and critical theorists – all of them, more often than not, apologists for their own cause – had it wrong. The authors do not discriminate: from eurocentric colonial critics to the ‘Asian fatalists’ of the early independence period and the mid-90s’ ‘Asian values’ debate, from the social pessimists who see nothing in ‘modernization’ but ‘oppressive-history-repeating’ to the ideologues of economic orthodoxy, The Emergence of Modern Southeast Asia offers discomforting food for thought.

Unfortunately, the authors missed to serve the dessert in an otherwise wellbalanced exercise in chronological history-telling and historical sociology.

Leaving behind the search for comprehensive paradigms is no impediment to pointing out common features that

[ a d v e r t i s e m e n t ]

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IIAS Newsletter | #41 | Summer 2006

manifest themselves in cross-country comparisons. Rather than leaving it up to the reader to identify them throughout the book, the authors would have done well to do so in a more detailed fashion in a summarizing chapter.

One such feature might be the blend of two distinct but inter-related economic systems in the region’s economic history – the emergence of a colonial export economy and the parallel development of regional markets in finance, goods and people. An easily neglected factor of social transformation, systems of credit introduced by Chinese and Indian shop-keepers and money lenders permeated the Southeast Asian countryside and monetized the rural economy long before the imposition of western colonial capitalism. And while the late 19th century global economy dominated by the latter left no scope for the emergence of infant industries to replace the export of raw materials with processed goods, this blend was to return in the post-colonial era in the form of Southeast Asia’s familytype business organizations and ethnic Chinese capitalism. The new national economies’ answer to the challenges posed by global economic structures, this coalescence became the foundation of the region’s distinctive development trajectory. As the authors explain, ‘to compete with multinational capitalism, Southeast Asia at first had to find business realms that were protected, even while depending on foreign ties for technology and markets.’ By the last decade of the 20th century, production and finance had reversed roles and this ‘Asian blend’ of capitalism was embedded in the global financial system, with well-known consequences.

Another feature is the distinctiveness of the colonial legacy. Colonial governments drew the maps of today’s Southeast Asia, but the economic, political and intellectual changes that followed colonial state-building were as important to the region’s post-colonial development as the ‘gunboats and uniformed troops’.

As the authors claim, ‘Western colonialism left behind in Southeast Asia, when it departed, small but significant elites, which compared well in creativity with their African, Latin American and Middle Eastern counterparts – for reasons that remain to be fully explored’.

These elites later determined how the created institutions adopted, responded and interacted with the modern world, and how centralized state authority was exercised.

As in any other region of the world, the history of Southeast Asia is a history of human excesses, foreign and domestic. It shows that growth does not foster social cohesion without policies designed to benefit the poor, that

free elections do not mean change in political power structures or the end of oligarchic rule, and that moving up the global value chain does not reduce the threat of imminent ecological collapse or labour exploitation. Immense challenges remain, from setting the terms of political authority to the distribution of economic resources, from sustainable development to the social transformations of economic modernization and finding the balance between traditional values and social liberalism.

Southeast Asian societies are still defining their social contracts; coping with adaptation and change remains a fragile process. Previously at the receiving end of political and economic prescriptions and faith-based proselytism, the region today is becoming a laboratory of the modern world in its own right: Southeast Asian societies are at the forefront of the search for solutions to an array of pressing issues, from integrating the national and global economies to reconciling individual rights, nationalism and cultural diversity, and defining relations between politics and religion in society.

Here the book ends. Concerned foremost with the emergence of ‘modern’ Southeast Asia, the authors seem to run out of steam once the first decades of independence are left behind and a new phase of global economic inter-dependence sets in. Bypassing the evolution of Southeast Asian states’ external relations, they miss an opportunity to add a regional perspective to their history.

Only one page is reserved to account for what the authors themselves call the ‘ASEAN Success Story’. No indication is given why ASEAN has become the most successful regional organization in the non-western world. The future may hold the irony that, like their former colonial powers, regional integration will enable Southeast Asian nations to establish themselves as agents in the coming global order, and will allow the defining of their relations with the coming world powers on their own terms.

As one observes the return to the region of what the authors call the ‘Chinese world system’ – coinciding with the decline of the manufacturing base of those western industrial economies that replaced it one and a half centuries ago – we may be witnessing the emergence of yet another ‘new’ history of Southeast Asia. Here, however, we enter the domain of current affairs and speculation – nothing to be expected from a history book. < Marcus von Essen Policy Associate, World Bank, Paris mvonessen@yahoo.de

Rahman Khan was born in 1874 in Hamirpur in the United Provinces in North India. His father, Mohammed Khan was an assistant to a local zamindar (landlord). The Khans claim descent from Afghani Pathan horsemen who came to the Indian plains in the 14th century.

Rahman Khan was educated to become a school-teacher (munshi), but while visiting Kanpur, he was approached by two middle-

For this reason the English translation of Munshi Rahman Khan’s autobiography Jeevan Prakash is an important milestone.

Rahman Khan was himself an indentured labourer who went to Surinam. Able to read and write well, he preserved his memories for posterity in a literary and historical document written in a mixture of languages and styles: Avadhi and Braj for poetry and Hindustani for prose.

I quote this anecdote to illustrate the lack of historical awareness in India about the Indians who went abroad as indentured labourers into such faraway places as South America. After the abolition of slavery in Surinam in 1863, the Dutch government was searching for labour to work on the sugar and cacao plantations. In 1870 the Dutch and the British reached an agreement on the migration of an indentured labour force from British India to Dutch Surinam. As a result, a regular migration flow from India commenced in 1873. Until 1916 when the system of indentured labour was abolished, approximately 34,000 British-Indians were transported by sea to Surinam.1 It is widely thought that they left no written memoirs.

n the late 80s I regularly visited the Calcutta harbour area, looking for the place from which the Surinamese Hindustanis had been shipped to Surinam. Local Calcutta taxi-drivers were at a loss when I mentioned the place I was looking for. One of them mentioned ‘Surinam quarters’. Some local residents had heard of it, but no one knew what Surinam meant. Finally, I located the spot owned by the Calcutta Electricity Supply Company and received official permission to see for myself what was left of the ‘Surinam quarters’ – a few old barracks, obviously built in the mid19th century, and jetties protruding into the Hooghly river. Otherwise, the word Surinam was consigned to oblivion.

I

Victor van Bijlert

IIAS Newsletter | #41 | Summer 2006

The English publication of Rahman Khan’s text is the result of intense international teamwork. Ellen Bal, Kathinka Sinha and Alok Deo Singh shaped the preliminary translation by Harjeet Singh and Kenneth Soymurun; the latter have also prepared an electronic version in Devanagari script of the

The book is a unique and extremely rich eyewitness account of rural life in the late 19th century in North India and the beginning of the 20th century in Surinam. To date, Rahman Khan’s Jeevan Prakash is the only source of personal history written by an indentured labourer. I would not hesitate to compare Rahman Khan’s book with the Hindi writings of Swami Sahajananda Saraswati (1889-1950), an important peasant leader in Bihar during the 1930s.2 In both cases we have accounts in an Indian vernacular by a participating observer. In the true sense of the word, Rahman Khan’s book represents the view-point of a subaltern.

The book takes the reader from a brief history of ancient and medieval India to Rahman Khan’s childhood, education, marriage and migration to Surinam. He gives a detailed account of his life in India and Surinam. He was born into a Muslim family and a practising Muslim, but local Hindus regarded him as an expert on Hinduism since he knew Tulsidas’ Ramcharitmanas extremely well.

Rahman Khan writes with a sense of sadness about the Indian missionaries of the Arya Samaj and the Sanatan Dharm who visited Surinam in the 1920s and 1930s, some of whose visits and preaching stirred up serious communal tensions between Hindus and Muslims. In 1934 there was a complete boycott by the Sanatan Dharm Hindus in Surinam of dealing with Muslims (pp.216, 236). The boycott, which ended only in 1943, included avoiding business dealings with Muslims, not inviting Muslims to Hindu social gatherings or even greeting them, and not taking water from the same well (p.217).

men who promised to make him supervisor of labourers in the sugar business. Without being aware of it, he was recruited for indentured labour in Surinam. Rahman was shipped to Surinam via Calcutta harbour in 1898. He worked as an indentured labourer for five years, then, in 1943, settled permanently in Surinam and began writing his autobiography. He never returned to India.

Victor van Bijlert Leiden University victorvanbijlert@wanadoo.nl

shi Rahman Khan. Den Haag: Amrit/NSHI.

3. Hira, Sandew, ed. 2003. Het Dagboek van Mun-

Delhi: Manohar.

W., ed. (incl. intro., endnotes and glossary). New

‘Khet Mazdoor’ with the Original Hindi Text. Hauser,

Labour and the Rural Poor: An Edited Translation of

Delhi: Manohar; 1994. Sahajananda on Agricultural

trans., ed. (incl. intro., endnotes and glossary). New

ants of Jharkhand: A View from 1941. Hauser, Walter,

translated: 1995. Swami Sahajananda and the Peas-

2. Sahajananda’s Hindi writings have been edited and

chief.nl/suriname/

the Dutch national archives: www.nationaalar-

dustani names can be found on the website of

Urbi et orbi. Information on the origins of Hin-

Orthodoxe Hindoeïsme in Suriname. Amsterdam:

Klerk, C.J.M. 1951. Cultus en Ritueel van het

practice of Hinduism in Surinam see also: de

Suriname. Amsterdam: Urbi et Orbi. For the

C.J.M. 1953. De Immigratie der Hindostanen in

immigration of Indians into Surinam: de Klerk,

1. See the earliest and still useful study on the

Notes

A few points of criticism of an otherwise fine book: the colour photographs, in themselves informative, are poor reproductions. The book has a glossary of Hindi, Surinamese and Dutch words, but unfortunately there is no general index. The curious philologist is thus eagerly awaiting a complete printed edition of the original multilingual and multi-layered text. This would be a real tribute to the literary accomplishments of Rahman Khan, who is credited with being the first author in the socalled Sarnami language, the Indian contact language spoken by the Surinamese Indians.

The book is recommended reading for subaltern studies historians, social scientists with a special interest in Indian diaspora studies, students of South Asian Islam and Hinduism, and historians of Surinam. <

original manuscript now in the possession of Albert Khan, Rahman Khan’s grandson (pp. ix-x). The Surinamese writer and historian Sandew Hira edited the Dutch version of Singh and Soymurun’s translation published in 2003.3 Ellen Bal, Kathinka Sinha and Alok Deo Singh wrote a lengthy scholarly introduction to the present English edition, which places Rahman Khan in the wider context of colonialism and labour migration.

2005. Autobiography of an Indian Indentured Labourer: Munshi Rahman Khan (1874-1972), Jeevan Prakash. Kathinka Sinha-Kerkhoff, Ellen Bal and Alok Deo Singh, translators. Delhi: Shipra Publications, lii-271 pages, ISBN 81-7541-243-7

British-Indians rowing in Surinam, ca 1920. KITLV

Autobiography of an Indian indentured labourer

> Review

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> Review

Creating the mindset for total war Kushner, Barak. 2006. The Thought War: Japanese Imperial Propaganda. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 243 pages, ISBN 10 0 8248 2920 4 (hardcover) Donald M. Seekins

H

istorians have remarked that few Japanese – the exceptions being a handful of stubborn communists – opposed their military rulers’ empire building in China and Southeast Asia during the Fifteen Years’ War (1931-1945). In The Thought War, Barak Kushner offers an explanation based on the pervasiveness and effectiveness of Japan’s wartime propaganda, which was deeply rooted in the country’s social structure and values.

Japanese leaders were keenly aware that the war on the ground could not be won without winning the thought war (shisosen). Propaganda (senden) was its principal weapon, not only to forge wholehearted support for the war effort among the Japanese people, but also to gain the trust of peoples in the newly conquered territories of the ‘Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere’. The various organisations and individuals involved in the thought war created highly sophisticated and, at least on the home front, remarkably effective products.

Pre-war and wartime propaganda was closely tied to an older concept, the Con-

fucian concept of ‘moral suasion’. Naturally, the Japanese police and military took a leading role, including the use of Allied POWs as weapons in the propaganda war. But the Japanese advertising industry saw the war as an opportunity to promote its own social respectability.

The Thought War also discusses Japanese efforts to counteract the skilful use of propaganda by the Chinese communists to undermine the morale of Japanese troops, and the ways in which wartime propaganda transformed itself into ‘defeat propaganda’, which urged the population to co-operate with the US occupation – although the goal of preserving the kokutai (national polity) did not change.

Some of Kushner’s most interesting discussions deal with the prominent role of comedy in wartime Japan. Teams of comedians (performers of traditional rakugo and manzai) went to the China front in warawashitai or ‘we want to make you laugh’ brigades to entertain the troops, and returned home to enthusiastic local audiences with glowing reports of military heroism, producing best-selling records of their most popular routines right up until 1945. This showed that for ordinary Japanese the war elicited a wide range of emotions:

not only rage at the enemy (‘hate the enemy – do not pity him’), grief for the fallen and shame if a father, husband or son were unfortunate enough to become a prisoner of war, but also laughter – and ceaseless light-hearted disparagement of the Chinese and Anglo-American enemy. Comedy was considered so important by the military that when comedienne Hanazono Aiko was killed by Chinese guerrillas while serving in a warawashitai brigade, she was given a state funeral attended by the wife of Premier Tojo Hideki and was enshrined in Tokyo’s Yasukuni Shrine (pp.106-107).

Kushner disputes the idea that the militarists as a group were solely responsible for Japan’s wars of aggression (the view of the Far East Tribunal) and a second widely accepted view, that the 19311945 period was a ‘dark valley’ in which the militarists terrorized and silenced Japan’s civil society. In fact, civil society – as represented by entertainers, advertising executives, intellectuals and ordinary citizens, men and women – wholeheartedly joined hands with the government and military in producing and consuming high quality propaganda. He calls this ‘democratic fascism’: ‘The media created an environment

[ a d v e r t i s e m e n t ]

Call for Papers Südostasien aktuell is an internationally refereed aca-

demic journal published by the Institute of Asian Affairs, Hamburg that focuses on current developments in Southeast Asia. The bimonthly journal has a circulation of 750 copies and reaches a broad readership in academia, administration and business circles.

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Südostasien aktuell is devoted to the transfer of schol-

arly insights to a wide audience. The topics covered should therefore not only be orientated towards specialists in Southeast Asian affairs, but should also be of relevance to readers with a practical interest in the region.

The editors welcome contributions on contemporary Southeast Asia that are concerned with the fields of international relations, politics, economics, society, education, environment or law. Articles should be theoretically grounded, empirically sound and reflect the state of the art in contemporary Southeast Asian studies.

All manuscripts will be peer-reviewed for acceptance.

The editors respond within three months Research articles should not exceed 10,000 words (incl. footnotes and references). Manuscripts should be submitted to the editors in electronic form (stylesheet: www.duei.de/ifa/stylesheet).

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in which Japanese individuals felt they participated in something larger than themselves.… Japanese propaganda programs demanded active participants, not drone-like followers’ (p.26).

But to what extent was the Japanese case unique? For all its major participants, the second world war involved the total mobilisation of national populations.

Weren’t German or American consumers of wartime propaganda also ‘active participants’? The difference, Kushner argues, is that senden was created and diffused by members of civil society as well as the military and the government, and possessed an ‘everydayness’ that made it ‘a virtually unassailable part of the social consciousness that stabilized wartime Japanese society’ (p.3). Moreover, the people’s co-operation with vertical authority, in the name of the kokutai and efficient social management, continued long after the war. The Thought War provides ample evidence that despite the post-1945 façade of ‘democratisation’, there is essential continuity in social structures and values between wartime and postwar Japan.

However, Kushner’s case for modernisation being the central theme of senden rather than ‘emperor worship’ (pp.1011) seems to miss a vital point. As John Dower argues in War without Mercy, the irrational polarization of the ‘pure self’ to the ‘demonic other’ was a major – if not the major – theme in wartime propaganda (Dower 1986: 203-261). The selfrepresentation of ‘Japan’ in the wartime era was complex and contradictory: a modern, hygienic, technically advanced nation, the natural leader of Asia, but also a place where irrational violence and death were glorified, where ‘purity’ was attained by washing away the stains of worldly existence with blood. Many Japanese find the comparison of the ‘Special Attack Forces’ (known as Kamikaze in the west) with Islamist suicide bombers offensive, but the parallels between the two are striking, especially the equation of violent death with spiritual purity.

A future edition of the book might expand its scope: the information war in China is covered in some detail, but not propaganda in the western colonies of Southeast Asia that were occupied (or ‘liberated’) by Japan in 1941-1942.

Burma and Indonesia are intriguing examples of how the Japanese attempted to enlist local cultures and nationalisms in the war effort, with arguably greater success than in China. Moreover, The Thought War inexplicably passes over a pivotal wartime figure, Otaka Yoshiko, the colourful singer and film star who, as the ‘Chinese’ Ri Ko-ran (Li Xianglan), became a propaganda icon in Japaneseoccupied parts of China and Manchuria (‘Ri Koran’, 2003).

One popular manzai (comedy duo) routine from 1943 involved a comparison of American and Japanese mothers. While the former worry about their sons and ‘put nice white flags in their service bags so that if the enemy catches them … well, you know …’, Japanese mothers demonstrate their superiority by being happy that their sons have the opportunity to die gloriously in battle, ‘like falling cherry blossoms’ (p.111). Such a routine, apparently performed without irony, entertained audiences staring blindly into the maw of defeat and destruction. Black comedy, indeed. < References - Dower, John. 1986. War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War. New York: Pantheon.

- ‘Looking back on my days as Ri Koran (Li Xianglan): Memories of Manchukuo’ (Ri Koran interviewed by Tanaka Hiroshi, Utsumi Aiko and Onuma Yasuaki). Originally published in Sekai, September 2003, accessed at http://www.japanfocus.org.

Donald M. Seekins is professor of Southeast Asian Studies at Meio University in Okinawa, Japan. His book Burma and Japan since 1940: From ‘Co-Prosperity’ to ‘Quiet Dialogue’ has just been published by NIAS Press. kenchan@ii-okinawa.ne.jp

[ a d v e r t i s e m e n t ]

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Edited by Norman G. Owen

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TRADITIONAL CHINESE CULTURE

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MURÒJI: Rearranging Art and History at a Japanese Buddhist Temple

Sherry Fowler

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A Balinese Painter Reminisces

Hildred Geertz & Ida Bagus Madé Togog

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IIAS Newsletter | #41 | Summer 2006

> Review

Polite language in modern Japan Wetzel, Patricia J. 2004. Keigo in Modern Japan. Polite Language from Meiji to the Present. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 304 pages, ISBN 0 8248 2602 7 Manfred B. Sellner

K

eigo is the Japanese word for ‘polite’ or ‘honorific language’. The term is also used to cover the more general phenomenon of ‘linguistic etiquette’. Although aspects of keigo are present in every language, one can assign Japanese keigo a special place in the field of socio-linguistic enquiry, as it was its critical examination by Japanese and other linguists in the late 1990s, together with the response to the seminal publication of Brown and Levinson’s Politeness: Some Universals in Language Use (1987), that marked the wave of scholarly attention to ‘politeness’.

The study of ‘polite and honorific language’ has subsequently become central to socio-linguistics, resulting in numerous publications examining the phenomenon within different frameworks of enquiry and in different languages. The interest in ‘politeness’ has recently spawned its own journal, the Journal of Politeness Research, and its own society, the Linguistic Politeness Research Group. ‘Politeness studies’ includes research on such variables as morphological and non-morphological coding of politeness, social distance, power, authority and degree of imposition of linguistic acts in different discourse contexts either in a single language or across languages. This domain of inquiry thus acts as a bridge and also constitutes a vital aspect in a related field of research known as ‘intercultural communication’.

Patricia Wetzel, author of Keigo in Modern Japan, deserves recognition for providing the linguistic community with a timely and in-depth study of politeness phenomena in Japanese. The book, which critically incorporates original Japanese resources, has two parts. The first gives an account of aspects of Japanese keigo; the second provides original Japanese texts and English translations of the most important ‘official’ (National Language Council) guidelines on the proper use and functions of keigo.

What is keigo?

The first part begins with an introduction answering ‘What is keigo?’ Here Wetzel concludes rather generally that ‘By its nature keigo represents the Japanese linguistic response to the boundary between self and other, much as person does in Indo-European languages’ (p.6). The discussion here also highlights Wetzel’s rightful claim that although morphologically marked honorific language has long been a structural feature of the Japanese language, the term keigo itself – along with a certain ‘keigo-ideology’ – was invented only at the beginning of the 20th century by Japanese grammarians in consultation and co-ordination with the National Language Council.

This makes keigo just as much a response to contact with ‘western languages’ as it is the result of attempts to codify

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the then contemporary, spoken Japanese language (of Tokyo) as the nationwide standard for instruction and communication. The ideology that Wetzel alludes to here is vague, yet very much alive – evident in popular ideas such as keigo is uniquely Japanese; keigo creates social identity; keigo is important in communication (‘I want to be more confident and better versed in keigo’); keigo is ‘in a state of disarray’ (the young generation cannot use is it properly, if at all).

These introductory remarks introduce an outline of some ‘western’ analyses of keigo (Ch.1, ‘Keigo in Linguistics’), contrasted with examples of work within the kokugogaku (Japanese language philology) paradigm (Ch.3, ‘Keigo in Kokugogaku’).

The author points out that it was Roy Andrew Miller (1967) who spread the notion in the West that Japanese women use more polite language than men, echoing the ideological Japanese claim – based on the Confucian heritage – that there is a special ‘women’s language’ defined at least in part by women’s more frequent and elaborate use of keigo. Actually, there is no good empirical evidence for any linear relationship between the use of keigo and gender, or even age. Wetzel further argues that ‘in many circumstances, keigo has nothing whatsoever to do with politeness’ or ‘deference’ (p.16) but fulfils important ancillary functions including, but not restricted to, such phenomena as the structuring of discourse and discourse modality. Wetzel concludes that ‘keigo ideology’ is just ‘more complex’ than often acknowledged in most works of ‘western’ linguistics, a view one cannot but support.

This leads to a historical account of keigo studies in kokugogaku (Japanese language philology). It provides the nomenclature used in the classification of (morphologically codified) keigo according to teinei-go (polite forms), kenjo-go (humble forms), sonkei-go (honorific forms), bika-go (beautifying forms), the all-embracing taigo-hyogen (expressions of consideration) and the hi-gengo-hyogen (non-linguistic expressions). The last comprise matters such as ‘neat clothing’, attitudes, manners and behaviour. The author successfully shows philological preoccupation with questions of terminology, the lack of distinguishing between language and the context of language use, and lack of rigour in many kokugo-grammar analyses.

that ‘linguistic stabilization is a precursor to modernization’ (pp.44-45). It is here that keigo-related information in the two appendices is most useful: by presenting the original Japanese text alongside excellent translations, it gives readers a firsthand impression of the nature of ‘official advice and guiding’ on keigo.

The trouble with our youth ‘Keigo as Common Sense’ (Ch.5) draws examples from various settings to illustrate ‘what it means to be Japanese’ and how keigo is not just ‘linguistic forms and rules’ but a force that impinges on everyday life. The immediate period after the second world war is regarded as the ‘golden age’ of keigo, followed by a time of relative disinterest before the 1970s spawned ‘keigo-nostalgia’. The present ‘keigo-disarray’ results in limited active and ‘correct’ use of keigo among younger generations, leading to the publication of numerous ‘how-to-dokeigo’ manuals and courses for ‘proper language use’. But the ‘how-to-do-keigo’ manuals and courses, as Wetzel found out by attending one, did not emphasise linguistically-oriented keigo training but ‘proper [prescribed] general conduct’ in social situations. Thus the target is not linguistic content, but such matters as greeting rules or even non-verbal aspects of public speech or behaviour.

Wetzel’s book is ground-breaking and this review cannot do justice to the wealth of information presented on any of the various aspects of Japanese keigo. To get at the details, the reader must inspect the volume for himself, as it provides a wealth of content and bibliographical information in English and Japanese that I have not found anywhere else. From there one can proceed to detailed and theoretically grounded research on almost any aspect of ‘polite language’ – in Japanese or any other language. < References - Brown, Penelope and Stephen C. Levinson. 1987. Politeness: Some Universals in Language Use. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

- Carroll, Tessa. 2001. Language Planning and Language Change in Japan. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press.

- Eelen, Gino. 2001. A Critique of Politeness Theories. Manchester: St. Jerome.

‘Inventing Keigo: Standardization’ (Ch.3) details the ‘official’ interventions of various language councils since the beginning of the 20th century, providing a lucid history of keigo prescriptivism: how, when, where and why the ‘received set’ was recommended. To understand this discussion it is important to realise that ‘language politics and planning’ remains a living and influential activity in Japan (as it does elsewhere); Wetzel rightfully sees it as ‘a by-product of the formation of national identities’ (p.43) driven by the still prevalent opinion

- Miller, Roy Andrew. 1967. The Japanese Language. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

- Watts, Richard J. 2003. Politeness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Manfred B. Sellner Department of Linguistics University of Salzburg manfred.sellner@sbg.ac.at

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IIAS Newsletter | #41 | Summer 2006

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> Review

Twenty-five centuries of body and face in China Wu Hung and Katherine R. Tsiang, eds. 2005. Body and Face in Chinese Visual Culture. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 448 pages, ISBN 0 674 01657 2 L u c i e n v a n Va l e n

B

ooks on Chinese visual culture generally examine one specific time period or archaeological excavation, or they take the form of an exhibition catalogue. Body and Face in Chinese Visual Culture, however, approaches its subject thematically. Its analysis of perceptions of body and face – examined in 12 different ways by as many specialists in the field of visual culture – spans Chinese history from the 5th century CE to the present. Case studies based on archaeological, visual and textual evidence inter-woven with anecdotal stories lure the reader from one era to the next. The variation in era and approach make for an informative volume containing remarkable insights into the reality of flesh and bone in Chinese cultural ­history.

The editors emphasise the importance of ‘...not simply adopting Western preconceptions and discourse in analysing Chinese representations of body and face’. While the ‘body and face’ in western visual history is seen as developing towards the representation of individuality, this book shows that Chinese perception disconnects body and face from a person’s individual features, instead representing the symbolic function of the person.

Origins of a visual culture The quest for the significance of body and face begins in part one, ‘The Religious Body’, and its opening chapter, ‘On Tomb Figurines, The Beginning of a Visual Tradition’, by Wu Hung. Archaeological evidence from the early period of Chinese civilisation allows Wu to give an overview of sculptures depicting or representing the human body, covering the six centuries between the Zhou period and the Han period with its dynastic tombs of nobles. In the 6th century BCE, Confucius cited tomb figurines as a recent development and denounced their lifelike form that implied human sacrifice. Wu, however, argues using recent archaeological evidence that the figurines were substitutes: their ‘emergence… is associated with a decline in human sacrifices’ (p.15).

with the image of thousands of soldiers standing in line as grey terra cotta figurines (p.40), when in fact these larger than life-sized sculptures of ancient warriors were originally painted in lifelike colour, which would have rendered a totally different appearance. Wu also leaves the figurines’ religious nature open to question.

28

The performing arts In the fourth and final part, ‘Performing the Body and Face’, ‘The Piping of Man’

by Susan E. Nelson shows examples of people depicted in a painting as if they are listening to the wind. According to the Daoist text Zhuangzi, the flow of ‘qi’, the cosmic breath, can be recognised in its powerful manifestation through sound. The lonely figure of a man with protruding lips whistling to the sky is in fact practising communication with the spiritual world.

Religion Religion plays a more prominent role in the following two chapters: Katherine R. Tsiang addresses visual aspects of Buddhist texts, and Eugene Y. Wang focuses on the Famen Relics of Tang court life.

These images are undoubtedly religious in nature and show the depiction of the Buddha as gradually shifting from representing his ‘True Body’ to a Buddha represented in scenes from his life depicted on statues in the late 6th century CE. Wang argues, ‘By identifying with the True Body of the Buddha, who is in fact bodiless, mortal beings can imagine a similar state of being for themselves’ (p.81). This must have been a very appealing concept to Tang rulers in their search for immortality.

The book’s second part, ‘Body Imagery and Self-representation’, is concerned with a more human aspect of the body and face. Kathleen M. Ryor presents the case of Xu Wei (1521-93), a painter specialising in the depiction of flowers and plants, whose physical and spiritual discomforts taint his renditions of his subjects’ beauty. Ryor cites Xu’s poems as evidence of his illness and argues that the painter’s mind and heart are directly connected to the movements of the hand that express his state of being directly on paper.

Qianshen Bai confronts us with ‘Illness, Disability, and Deformity in Seventeenth Century Chinese Art’, and blames the

In the final chapter Zhang Zhen discusses ‘Song at Midnight’, a horror film released in Shanghai in 1937, which tells a story of love and loss partly based on The Phantom of the Opera (1925).

While the Chinese perception of sound described in ‘The Piping of Man’ depicts man in balance with nature, Zhang describes the opposite: haunting sound effects create a sphere of horror and violence. In early Chinese film, body and sound are physically separated, because the female actor’s voice is in fact the synchronised voice of a male opera singer playing a female part. Zhang convincingly argues the influence of German expressionist cinema, while in his view ‘…the visual style and the acoustic composition of “Song at Midnight”…are far from a simple mimicry of Hollywood’ (p.359).

Three male figurines, tomb of Emperor Jingdi, Yangling mausoleum, Han Dynasty 206 BCE – 220 CE, terra-cotta , 62 x 10 x 10 cm. (c) The Shaanxi Archaeological Institute

Ming-Qing transition for the sense of loss and helplessness in the reports by poets and calligraphers of their physical ailments. Physical problems have played a role in artists’ work before, but in the 17th century they were exploited as metaphors for moral and emotional issues. By the end of the Ming period explicit claim of physical deformities in calligraphy can be interpreted as alienation from the foreign Manchu power.

From that point onwards, this concept of illness as metaphor is a recurring theme in Chinese visual culture.

Individual face versus representation

Wu argues that changes in religious and cultural life are reflected in the various figurine materials and sizes. He assigns material symbolism a role in the fabrication of the sculptures when he argues that ‘the use of these materials was not based on individual choice but determined by cultural conventions’ (p.29).

He links the Chu region in the south with wood and the northern region with pottery, but I can’t help but wonder whether the choice of material depended more on the natural environment and availability of these materials.

Wu’s case study of the First Emperor takes us among the great variety of artefacts found around the tumulus of Qin Shihuang. The world famous terra cotta soldiers are described in detail, including individual faces and hairstyles (pp.45-47). But Wu leaves the reader

centres her argument around the difference between western and Chinese principles of image likeness.

Archer with a green face, tomb of Qin ­Shihuang, Qinling mausoleum, Qin Dynasty 221- 206 BCE, painted terra-cotta, 152 x 60 x 40 cm. (c) Museum of the Terracotta Warriors and Horses of Qin Shihuangdi

IIAS Newsletter | #41 | Summer 2006

In part three, ‘Body-Face Interactions in Portraiture’, Jan Stuart considers portraiture in ‘The Face in Life and Death, Mimesis and Chinese Ancestor Portraits’. Taking us back to the Ming and Qing period, Stuart outlines what distinguishes Chinese portraits from the western standard for portraiture.

The western painter is concerned with the exact likeness of a person at a given moment in time. ‘Unlike other categories of Chinese portraiture’, Stuart writes, ‘ancestor likeness did not seek to convey a person’s inner spirit; rather they aimed only at transcribing the heaven endowed physiognomy of the sitter’s face’ (p.201). It is not the specifics of a person, but the position of the person that defines the image.

The importance of the painted ancestor

is limited by custom: ‘When rolled up, the portrait was no more “alive” than a landscape painting, but ritual performances before a likeness attracted the spirit and empowered the painting to receive offerings and in turn reciprocate by blessing the family’ (p.205).

Stuart concludes that these ancestor portraits are created as ritual objects and disproves the notion that they all look alike.

Roberta Wu reveals the illuminating story of a Chinese photographer able to produce portraits of his customers without using a camera. He possessed a large set of negatives from which he carefully selected the most fitting likeness. Printing the one he thought was most appropriate for the occasion, he presented the photograph to the customer as a true image. Here again, the individual features of the person seem less important than the purpose of the image, and Wu

In China, earthly representation is often connected to the supernatural, but in this book we see the physical traces of past generations in a down-to-earth way. The book’s contrast between Chinese perception and western perception guides the reader and presents a refreshing, coherent perspective of Chinese visual culture. The volume surpasses what the individual papers can achieve on their own, and the chapters I have not mentioned are full of interesting arguments on the theme of body and face. As a whole, the book makes good reading for anyone interested in Asian visual culture. It will also serve ‘western’ art history as an example of the current development towards a more global history of art. < Lucien van Valen was a fellow at IIAS in 2004/2005. She recently finished her PhD at Leiden University with a thesis on ‘The Matter of Chinese Painting, Case Studies of 8th Century Murals’ L.van.Valen@let.leidenuniv.nl

Replica of the painted soldiers are shown at : Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland GmbH Museumsmeile Bonn, Friedrich-Ebert-Allee 4 53113 Bonn, Germany 21 April - 23 July 2006, Xi’an – Imperial Power in the Afterlife Burial Goods and Temple Treasures from China’s Ancient Capital Results of German-Chinese cooperation in the Protection of Cultural Property

Tsur, Reuven. 2006

‘Kubla Khan’- Poetic Structure, Hypnotic Quality and Cognitive Style

Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing ­Company. pp.251, tables, ISBN 90-272-2369-6

East Asia

Brown, Steven and Ulrik Volgsten eds. 2006

Music and Manipulation: On the Social Uses and Social Control of Music

New York: Berghahn Books. pp.376, ill., ISBN 1-57181-489-2

Cole, Benjamin. 2006

Pinxten, Rik and Ellen Preckler. 2006

IIAS Newsletter | #41 | Summer 2006

Copenhagen: NIAS Press. pp.203, tables, ISBN 87-91114-91-8

Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. pp.284, ISBN 0-8248-2896-8

Negotiating Masculinities in Late Imperial China

Huang, Martin W. 2006

Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. pp.208, ill., ISBN 0-8248-3017-2

Imaging the Course of Life: SelfTransformation in a Shan Buddhist Community

Copenhagen: NIAS Press. pp.316, ill., maps & tables, ISBN 87-911114-41-1

Eberhardt, Nancy. 2006

Seattle: University of Washington Press. pp.223, ill., maps & tables, ISBN 0-295-98539-9

Hojlund Roesgaard, Marie. 2006

Japanese Education and the Cram School Business: Functions, Challenges and Perspectives of the Juku

Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. pp.207, ISBN 0-8248-2974-3

Property & Politics in Sabah, Malaysia; Native Struggles over Land Rights

Spirit Matters: The Transcendent in Modern Japanese Literature

Hamburg. pp.62, ill., German, ISBN 3-00-018718-9

China Diary: Fotografien von Carl Bürger: Eine Dokumentation des Alltagslebens im Reich der Mitte zwischen 1938 und 1948

Friede, Claus and Mathias v. Marcard. 2006

Doolittle, Amity A. 2005

Leiden: KITLV Press. pp.415, ill., maps & tables, ISBN 90-6718-243-5

Muddied Waters: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Management of Forests and Fisheries in Island Southeast Asia

Boomgaard, Peter, David Henley and Manon Osseweijer. 2005

Southeast Asia

Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. pp.292, ISBN 0-8248-2694-9

Korean Language in Culture and Society

Sohn, Ho-min ed. 2006

Gabriel, Philip. 2006

Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. pp.292, colour ill., ISBN 0-8248-2937-9

Challenging the Past and Present: The Metamorphosis of Nineteenth-Century Japanese Art

Conant, Ellen P. 2006

Mongols from Country to City: Floating Boundaries, Pastoralism and City Life in the Mongol Lands

Bruun, Ole and Li Narangoa eds. 2006

Central Asia

New York: Berghahn Books. pp.189, ISBN 1-84545-088-4

London: Routledge. pp.202, tables, ISBN 0-415-30840-2

Poverty and Inequality among Chinese Minorities

Racism in Metropolitan Areas

Bhalla, A.S. and Shufang Qiu. 2006

China

Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. pp.161, ISBN 0-8032-2435-4

Copenhagen: NIAS Press. pp.146, tables, ISBN 87-91114-67-5

Internet, Governance and Democracy: Democratic Transitions from Asian and European Perspectives

Hoff, Jens ed. 2006

Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. pp.242, ill., ISBN 0-8248-2874-7

Modern Passings: Death Rites, Politics, and Social Change in Imperial Japan

Hong, Keelun and Stephen O. Murray. 2006

Copenhagen: NIAS Press. pp.320, tables, ISBN 87-91114-81-0

Looking through Taiwan: American Anthropoligists’ Collusion with Ethnic Domination

Bernstein, Andrew. 2006

Copenhagen: NIAS Press. pp.275, tables, ISBN 87-91114-99-3

The Power of Ideas: Intellectual Input and Political Change in East and Southeast Asia

Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. pp.182, ill., maps & tables, ISBN 0-8248-3029-6

Politics, Culture and Self: East Asian and North European Attitudes

Derichs, Claudia and Thomas Heberer eds. 2006

Madrid: Editorial Verbum. pp.185, maps & tables, ISBN 84-7962-359-4

Gateway to Japan: Hakata in War and Peace, 500-1300

North Korea and Regional Security

Ojeda, Alfonso and Alvaro Hidalgo eds. 2006

Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. pp.408, ISBN 0-8248-2912-3

Christianity in Korea

Buswell, Robert E. Jr and Timothy S. Lee. 2006

Korea

Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. pp.478, ISBN 0-2848-2951-4

Ogyu Sorai’s Philosophical Masterworks: The Bendo and Benmei

Tucker, John A. trans. and ed. 2006

Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. pp.218, ISBN 0-8248-2922-0

Swords, Oaths, and Prophetic Visions: Authoring Warrior Rule in Medieval Japan

Batten, Bruce L. 2006

Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. pp.253, colour ill., ISBN 0-8248-2018-5

Traditional Japanese Arts and Culture: An Illustrated Sourcebook

Helgessen, Geir and Seren Risjberg Thomsen eds.

2006

Berkeley: The Institute of East Asian Studies. pp.664, ill., ISBN 89-954424-2-5

The Imjin War: Japan’s Sixteenth Century Invasion of Korea and Attempt to Conquer China

Addiss, Stephen, Gerald Groemer and J. Thomas Rimer eds. 2006

Japan

Seattle: Washington University Press. pp.429, ill., ISBN 0-295-98567-4

Shanghai Love: Courtesans, Intellectuals, & Entertainement Culture, 1850-1910

Yeh, Catherine. 2006

London: Verso. pp.228, tables, ISBN 1-84467-022-8

Planet of Slums

Davis, Mike. 2006

London: Routledge. pp.147, ISBN 0-415-35198-7

Conflict, Terrorism and the Media in Asia

Hawley, Samuel. 2005

London: Routledge. pp.162, ISBN 0-415-34134-5

London: Routledge. pp.203, ISBN 0-415-34611-8

Hong Kong: Asia Art Archive. pp.287, colour ill., English and Chinese, ISBN 988-97664-2-6

Red Humour International

Russian Culture in Uzbekistan : One Language in the Middle of Nowhere

State Making in Asia

Wu, Shanzhuan. 2005

MacFayden, David. 2006

Boyd, Richard and Tak-Wing Ngo. 2006

Oyler, Elizabeth. 2006

Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. pp.280, colour ill., ISBN 0-8248-2900-x

Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. pp.186, ill., ISBN 0-8248-2952-2

Ithaca: Snow Lion. pp.269, ISBN 1-55939-244-4

Phillips: Borneo Research Council. pp.42, tables, ISBN 1-929900-07-4

Genes, People, and Borneo History; A Review

Baer, A. 2005

Indonesia

Copenhagen: NIAS Press. pp.382, ISBN 87-91114-43-8

Southeast Asian Responses to Globalization: Restructuring Governance and Deepening Democracy

Wah, Francis Loh Kok and Joakim Ojendal. 2005

Ithaca: Cornell Southeast Asia Program. pp.66, ISBN 0-877271-40-2

The Industry of Marrying Europeans

Vu Trong Phung. 2006

Copenhagen: NIAS Press. pp.251, ISBN 87-91114-85-3

Civil Society and Democratization: Social Movements in Northeast Thailand

Phatharathananunth, Somchai. 2006

Copenhagen: NIAS Press. pp.290, ISBN 87-91114-24-1

Kammu Songs: The Songs of Kam Raw

Lundström, Hakan and Damrong Tayanin. 2006

Ithaca: Cornell University Press. pp.212, ill., maps & tables, ISBN 978-0-8014-4393-0

Subject Siam; Family Law, and Colonial Modernity in Thailand

Loos, Tamara. 2006

Clayton: Monash University Press. pp.326, ISBN 981-230-351-0

Violence in Between: Conflicts and Security in Archipelagic Southeast Asia

Kingsbury, Damien ed. 2005

Ithaca: Cornell University Press. pp.197, ill., ISBN 978-0-8014-7284-8

Mien Relations: Mountain People and State Control in Thailand

Jonsson, Hjorleifur. 2005

Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. pp.268, ill., ISBN 0-8248-2921-2

In the Name of Civil Society: From Free Election Movements to People Power in the Philippines

Hadman, Eva-Lotta E. 2006

Bangkok: Silkworm Books. pp.164, ISBN 974-9575-85-7

The Muslims of Thailand

Gilquin, Michel. 2005

Singapore: Select Publishing. pp.202, ill., ISBN 981-05-5271-8

Dignity Overdue

Gee, John and Elaine Ho. 2006

Books received

Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. pp.112, ISBN 90-5356-828-x

Capitalscapes: Folding Screens and Political Imagination in Late Medieval Kyoto

Parting the Mists: Discovering Japan and the Rise of National-Style Painting in Modern China

The Great Kagyu Masters: The Golden Lineage Treasury

McKelway, Matthew Philip. 2006

Wong, Aida Yuen. 2006

Reformation of Islamic Thought; A Critical Historical Analysis

Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. pp.246, colour ill., ISBN 0-8248-2697-3

Seattle: University of Washington Press. pp.319, ISBN 0-295-98553-4

Abu Zayd, Nasr. 2006

Explaining Pictures: Buddhist Propaganda and Etoki Storytelling in Japan

Tao Yuanming & Manuscript Culture; The Record of a Dusty Table

Gyaltsen, Khenpo Könchog (trans.) and Victoria Huckenpahler (ed.). 2006

General

> Books received

Kaminishi, Ikumi. 2006

Tian, Xiaofei. 2005

iiasnews@let.leidenuniv.nl

received? Request a copy from the editors at:

Interested in reviewing one of our Books

Urbana: University of Illinois Press. pp.313, ill., ISBN 0-252-03116-4

The Black Cow’s Footprint: Time, Space and Music in the Lives of the Kotas of South India

Wolf, Richard K. 2006

New Delhi: Gyan Publishing House. pp.286, ill., ISBN 81-212-0890-4

Tyranny of Partition: Hindus in Bangladesh and Muslims in India

Sinha-Kerkhoff, Kathinka. 2006

New Delhi: Sage Publications. pp.367, maps & tables, ISBN 0-7619-3436-7

Colonial and Post-Colonial Geographies of India

Raju, Saraswati, M. Satish Kumar and Stuart Corbridge eds. 2006

New Delhi: Sage Publications. pp.244, ISBN 0-7619-3467-7

Participatory Citizenship: Identity, Exclusion, Inclusion

Mohanty, Ranjita and Rajesh Tandon. 2006

New Delhi: Sage Publications. pp.410, maps & tables, ISBN 0-7619-3464-2

Chronic Poverty and Development Policy in India

Kapur Mehta, Aasha and Andrew Shepherd eds.

2006

London: Routledge. pp.277, ISBN 0-415-35920-1

Buddhism, Conflict and Violence in Modern Sri Lanka

Deegalle, Mahinda. 2006

New Delhi: Sage Publications. pp.261, tables, ISBN 0-7619-3459-6

Poverty, Gender and Migration

Arya, Sadhna, Anupama Roy eds. 2006

South Asia

Amsterdam: KIT Publishers. pp.208, colour ill., ISBN 90-6832-494-2

Indonesia: The Discovery of the Past

Sri Hardiati, Endang and Pieter ter Keurs eds. 2005

Amsterdam: KIT Publishers. pp.180, colour ill., ISBN 90-6832-540-x

Iban Art: Sexual Selection and Severed Heads

Heppell, Michael, Limbang anak Melaka and Enyan anak Usen. 2005

Berlin: Reimer Verlag. pp.531, ill., German, ISBN 3-496-02784-3

Die Erfindung des Barong: Mythos, Ritual und Alterität auf Bali

Gottowik, Volker. 2005

> Review

29

30

IIAS Newsletter | #41 | Summer 2006

Melody Lu (Taiwan) Affiliated fellow Intermediated cross-border marriages in East and Southeast Asia 1 February – 31 July 2006

HU Hong-yan (China) Affiliated fellow, within the programme ‘TransHimalayan database development: China and the Subcontinent’, sponsored by CASS and KNAW 15 May – 15 August 2006

John Nguyet Erni (Hong Kong, China) Stationed at the Amsterdam Branch Office Affiliated fellow Imagining ‘Asia’ in Global Human Rights 30 June – 19 July 2006

Katia Chirkova (Russia) Programme coordinator, within the programme ‘Trans-Himalayan database development: China and the Subcontinent’, sponsored by CASS and KNAW 1 September 2005 – 1 September 2006

General

IIAS fellows can choose to be based in Leiden or at the Branch Office Amsterdam.

All fellows currently engaged at IIAS are listed below selected by region of specialty and in alphabetical order.

Fellowship categories: 1. Affiliated fellows 2. Research fellows 3. Senior fellows 4. IIAS Professors 5. Artists in Residence

Liesbet Nyssen Stationed at the Branch Office Amsterdam Interethnic Relations in Siberia 1 March 2005 – 1 Augustus 2006

Rieke Leenders (the Netherlands) Stationed at the Branch Office Amsterdam Interethnic Relations in Siberia 1 March 2005 – 1 Augustus 2006

Central Asia

ZHOU Mao-cao (China) Affiliated fellow, within the programme ‘TransHimalayan database development: China and the Subcontinent’, sponsored by CASS and KNAW 15 May – 15 August 2006

YIN Wei-bin (China) Affiliated fellow, within the programme ‘TransHimalayan database development: China and the Subcontinent’, sponsored by CASS and KNAW 15 May – 15 August 2006

Geshê Karma Tshering (Bhutan) Affiliated Fellow, within the programme ‘Languages and Genes of the Greater Himalayan Region’, sponsored by ESF, RGoB and LUMC 12 June – 31 August 2006

David N. Soo (UK) Affiliated fellow Globalisation: an investigation into the emerging Asian space industry. A new force in space?

4 October 2002 – 31 July 2006

Bert Remijsen (Belgium) Affiliated fellow Hybrid word prosodic systems 1 July 2002 – 31 July 2006

Sheldon Pollock (USA) Senior fellow Comparative intellectual histories of early ­modern Asia 20 May – 20 August 2006

Prasanna Kumar Patra (India) Research fellow, within the ASSR/IIAS/NWO programme ‘Socio-Genetic Marginalization in Asia’ (SMAP) Cross-cultural comparative study of genetic research in India and Japan 15 December 2005 – 15 November 2008

Hisashi Owada (Japan) Special Chair at the Faculty of Arts, Leiden University IIAS Professor Relations between Europe and Japan 1 April 2006 - 1 April 2009

Scott Kugle (USA) Stationed at the Branch Office Amsterdam Affiliated fellow Pilgrimage to pluralism: Religious co-existence in Hyderabad and the Indian Ocean Religion 1 August 2006 – 1 August 2007

Peter Khoroche (UK) Affiliated fellow, sponsored by Gonda ­Foundation HAla: SattasaG; An annotated translation into English 15 August – 30 September 2006

HARIMOTO Kengo (Japan) Affiliated fellow, sponsored by Gonda ­Foundation A critical edition of the first chapter of the PAtanjalayogaPAstravivarana 1 November 2005 – 31 July 2006

Jyotsna Agnihotri Gupta (the Netherlands) Research fellow, within the ASSR/IIAS/NWO programme ‘Socio-Genetic Marginalization in Asia’ Reproductive genetics and counselling in India: Decision-making regarding genetic screening and prenatal diagnosis 1 September 2004 – 31 August 2007

Silvia D’Intino (Italy) Affiliated fellow, sponsored by Gonda ­Foundation The SkandasvAmibhAsya on Rgveda. A critical study 1 April - August 2006

Manja Bomhoff (the Netherlands) Affiliated fellow, within the IIAS initiative ­‘Elderly Care’ A cultural analysis of senior’s social lives in urban Kerala, India 1 May – 31 August 2006

Maarten Bode (the Netherlands) Stationed at the Branch Office Amsterdam Affiliated fellow The politics of value and the construction of cultural commodities: Marketing, buying and criticizing Indian indigenous medical products, 1980-2000 1 February – 31 July 2006

Bhaswati Bhattacharya (the Netherlands) Affiliated fellow The Armenian diaspora in India, 1500-1950 1 May 2005 – 31 December 2006

David Bourchier (Australia) Stationed at the Branch Office Amsterdam Affiliated fellow Dutch legal thought and the evolution of organicist political ideology in Indonesia 6 August – 6 November 2006

Ruth Barnes (Germany) Affiliated fellow Early textile collections from Eastern Indonesia in the National Museum of Ethnology, Leiden and photographic collections from Eastern Indonesia in the KITLV 10 – 17 July 2006 and 15 March – 15 April 2007

Robert H. Barnes (USA) Affiliated fellow Documentation pertaining to the political history of Nusa Tenggara Timur in the Nationaal Archief and the KITLV 10 – 17 July 2006 and 15 March – 15 April 2007

Jet Bakels (the Netherlands) Affiliated fellow Researching tribal traditions in a changing society 1 March 2006 – 1 March 2007

Southeast Asia

Suhnu Ram Sharma (India) Affiliated fellow, sponsored by Gonda ­Foundation A grammar of Manchad language 1 April – 31 August 2007

Karuna Sharma (India) Affiliated fellow From reverence to devaluation: Women and labour in Medieval India c. 1200- c. 1800 2 January 2006 – 2 January 2007

Om Prakash (India) Senior fellow, sponsored by Van den Berch van Heemstede Foundation The trading world of the Indian Ocean, 1500-1800 1 July – 30 August 2006

Kim Plofker (USA) Affiliated fellow, sponsored by NWO Mathematics in India, 500 BCE – 1800 CE, with special emphasis on its relationship with Islamic mathematics (750 – 1800 CE) 9 September 2004 – 9 September 2006

Shoma Munshi (India) Affiliated fellow & IIAS representative India The new world of Indian satellite television: ­Transnational networks and society 1 November 2004 – 1 November 2006

Debendranath Mishra (India) Affiliated fellow, sponsored by Gonda ­Foundation The Mâdhava Cikitsâ tradition in Orissa 20 July – 19 December 2006

IIAS fellows

IIIAS hosts several categories of post doctoral researchers (fellows) in Asia Studies. Sponsorship of these fellows contributes to the institute’s aim of enhancing expertise and encouraging the exploration of underdeveloped fields of study. One of the main objectives of IIAS is to mediate in establishing contacts in the field of Asia Studies and to stimulate cooperation between national and international scholars and institutes. IIAS consequently offers universities and research institutes the opportunity to benefit from the knowledge of its resident fellows. In terms of their scholarly contribution to IIAS, fellows are invited to present lectures, participate in seminars, and cooperate in research programmes. IIAS fellows’ applications can be submitted at any time (no application deadline). More information and IIAS fellowships application forms are available at: www.iias.nl/iias/fellowships For specific information, please contact: iiasfellowships@let.leidenuniv.nl

> IIAS fellows

Irfan Ahmad (India) Affiliated fellow Contesting Islamism: Immanent critique of Jamaat e-Islami of India, from 1941 to the present 1 March – 1 September 2006

South Asia

Mina Roces (Australia) Affiliated fellow Fashioning the Filipino: Dress and ‘Ilustrado’ identity in nineteenth century Philippines 20 July – 19 August 2006

Thomas Lindblad (the Netherlands) Project coordinator, within the programme ‘Indonesianisasi and nationalism. The emancipation and reorientation of the economy and the world of industry and commerce’, sponsored by NIOD 1 October 2002 – 1 October 2006

Jeyamalar Kathirithamby-Wells (Malaysia) Senior fellow The impact of the sayyid of Hadhramaut on state and society in Southeast Asia 1 October – 30 November 2006

Nico Kaptein (the Netherlands) Senior fellow and project coordinator within the programme ‘Islam in Indonesia’ Islam and state in the Netherlands East Indies: The life and work of Sayyid ’Uthmân (1822 – 1914) 1 May 2006 - 1 May 2009

Webby Kalikiti (Zambia) Stationed at the Branch Office Amsterdam Affiliated fellow Plantation labour: Rubber planters and the colonial state in French Indochina 1890-1939 17 May – 6 August 2006

1 September 2006 – 1 September 2008

in the syntax of classical Malay

The morphology and the movements of constituents

Mashudi bin Kader (Malaysia) IIAS Professor, holder of the European Chair of Malay Studies

Hans Hägerdal (Sweden) Affiliated fellow, sponsored by the Swedish Vetenskapsrådet Early modern Timor; The meeting between indigenous groups and colonial interests 20 July 2005 – 20 July 2006

Dwi Noverini Djenar (Indonesia) Affiliated fellow Preposition in spoken and written Indonesian 1 September - 1 December 2006

Deirdre de la Cruz (Philippines) Affiliated fellow All His instruments: Miracles, Mary, and media in the Catholic Philippines 1 July – 31 August 2006

Joost Coté (Australia) Affiliated fellow Exploring colonial modernities: Semarang 1880-1920 1 – 30 September 2006

Amsterdam School for Social Science Research, the Netherlands BICER: Bureau of International Cultural and Educational Relations, Ministry of Education, Taiwan CASS: Chinese Academy of Social Sciences CNWS: School of Asian, African, and Amerindian ­Studies, the Netherlands CSC: Chinese Scholarship Council ESF: European Science Foundation IDPAD: Indo-Dutch Programme on Alternatives in Development KNAW: Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and ­Sciences KRF: Korea Research Foundation, Korea LUMC: Leiden University Medical Centre NIOD: Netherlands Institute for War Documentation NSC: National Science Council, Taiwan NWO: Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research RoGB: Royal Government of Bhutan SSAAPS: Swedish School of Advanced Asia-Pacific ­Studies SASS: Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences WOTRO: Netherlands Foundation for the Advancement of Tropical Research

ASSR:

IIAS partners and fellow sponsors:

WANG Hong-zen (Taiwan) Affiliated fellow within the programme ‘Foreign brides’, sponsored by NSC Materializing the assimilation of the ‘other’ - How does the Taiwanese state normalize ­Vietnamese wives 15 June – 13 September 2006

TSAI Yen-zen (Taiwan) IIAS Professor, holder of the European Chair in Chinese Studies Chinese religion 1 September 2006 – 1 September 2007

PAIK Wook Inn (Korea) Affiliated fellow, sponsored by KRF Socio-cultural effects of digital media in Korea 25 January 2006 – 23 December 2006

1 February 2005 – 1 February 2009

Socio-genetic marginalisation and vulnerable ethnic groups in Southwest China

Jan-Eerik Leppänen (Finland) PhD student within the ASSR/IIAS/NWO programme ‘Socio-Genetic Marginalization in Asia’

LEE Mei-Mei-yen (China) Affiliated fellow Guqin music in Van Gulik’s collection 1 August 2006 – 31 January 2007

KATO Masae (Japan) Research fellow, within the ASSR/IIAS/NWO programme ‘Socio-Genetic Marginalization in Asia’ A comparative study on socio-genetic marginalisation: Japan in “Asia” in relation to the “West” as a reference group 1 April 2005 – 1 April 2008

East Asia

Hein Steinhauer (the Netherlands) IIAS Professor Special Chair ‘Ethnolinguistics of East Indonesia’ at the Radboud University Nijmegen 1 September 1998 - 1 September 2006

> IIAS fellows

> IIAS research [ a d v e r t i s e m e n t ]

IIAS research programmes, networks & initiatives Programmes Care of the aged: gender, institutional provisions and social security in India, the Netherlands and Sri Lanka This IDPAD/IIAS comparative research project addresses the implications of population aging for the social security and health care of elderly people. As the experience of ageing is gendered and can vary according to class, caste, and religion, the project addresses different social and economic groups, with an emphasis on women.

Coordinator: Carla Risseeuw risseeuw@fsw.leidenuniv.nl

Catalogue of Sanskrit manuscripts In 1929, two crates of 17th and 18th century Sanskrit manuscripts arrived at the Kern Institute, University of Leiden. This Gonda/IIAS project is preparing a scientific catalogue of the roughly 500 South Indian Sanskrit manuscripts written on palm leafs in ancient Indian scripts such as Grantha, Telugu, Malayalam, Nagari and Nandinagari.

Coordinator: Saraju Rath s.rath@let.leidenuniv.nl

Energy programme Central Asia This programme on the geopolitics of energy focuses on ­Chinese, Indian, Japanese and South Korean strategies to secure oil and natural gas from the Caspian region (Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Iran, and Russia) and the Persian Gulf. The programme is institutionally supported by IIAS and the Clingendael International Energy Programme (CIEP), Den Haag.

Coordinator: Mehdi Parvizi Amineh m.p.amineh@uva.nl

Indonesianisasi and nationalization From the 1930s to the early 1960s, the Indonesian economy transformed from a ‘colonial’ economy, dominated by the Dutch, to a ‘national’ economy in which indigenous business assumed control. This NIOD project explores this transformation, studying the late-colonial era as well as the Japanese occupation, the Revolution and the Sukarno period. Two issues are given special attention: Indonesianisasi and nationalization, in particular the expropriation of Dutch corporate assets in Indonesia in 1957-58.

Coordinator: J. Thomas Lindblad j.t.lindblad@let.leidenuniv.nl

A n n o u n c e m e n t

Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology (Chinese Academy of Social Sciences) with language data of the George van Driem Himalayan Languages Project (Leiden University) to create a joint, online database of Tibeto-Burman languages with a mirror-site in Leiden. The project’s second objective is to continue documentation of endangered Tibeto-Burman languages in China in cooperation with the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology.

Coordinator: Katia Chirkova k.chirkova@let.leidenuniv.nl

Networks ABIA South and Southeast Asian art and archaeology index The Annual Bibliography of Indian Archaeology is an annotated bibliographic database for publications covering South and Southeast Asian art and archaeology. The project was launched by IIAS in 1997 and is currently coordinated by the Postgraduate Institute of Archaeology of the University of Kelaniya, Colombo, Sri Lanka. The database is freely accessible at www.abia.net. Extracts from the database are also available as bibliographies, published in a series by Brill. The project receives scientific support from UNESCO. Coordinator: Ellen Raven e.m.raven@let.leidenuniv.nl www.abia.net

Islam in Indonesia: the dissemination of religious authority in the 20th and early 21st centuries Forms and transformations of religious authority among the Indonesian Muslim community are the focus of this research programme. The term authority relates to persons and books as well as various other forms of written and non-written references. Special attention is paid to the production, reproduction and dissemination of religious authority in the fields of four sub-programmes: ulama (religious scholars) and fatwas; tarekat (mystical orders); dakwah (propagation of the faith); and education.

Coordinator: Nico Kaptein n.j.g.kaptein@let.leidenuniv.nl

Paleo-environments and environmental change in Asia IIAS-EFEO masterclass 18-20 September 2006 L’EFEO, Paris, France Convenor:

Initiatives

Franciscus Verellen (EFEO) Led by:

Illegal but licit: transnational flows and permissive polities in Asia

Earth monitoring and the social sciences

Dan Penny (School of Geosciences, University of Sydney, Australia)

This research programme analyses forms of globalisationfrom-below, transnational practices considered acceptable (licit) by participants but which are often illegal in a formal sense. It explores limitations of ‘seeing like a state’, and instead privileges the perspectives of participants in these illegal but licit transnational flows.

The space age has dramatically impacted all nations. In Asia, the ‘space-faring nations’ of India, China and Japan have successfully developed space technologies and applications.

Other Asian nations have readily adopted these applications, including satellites for telecommunications, for gathering data on the weather, and environmental and earth resources.

IIAS has initiated a series of workshops on the topic.

Southeast Asia, particularly its core equatorial region, is one of three regions on earth (the others being Amazonia and equatorial Africa) where massive exchanges of energy drive global climatic circulation. Examining its longterm environmental history is necessary to understand climatic patterns and dynamics – within the region, and on the global scale.

Coordinator: Willem van Schendel h.w.vanschendel@uva.nl

Coordinator: David Soo d.n.soo@let.leidenuniv.nl

Socio-genetic marginalization in Asia

Cross-border marriages in East and Southeast Asia

The development and application of new biomedical and genetic technologies have important socio-political implications. This NWO/ASSR/IIAS research programme aims to gain insight into the ways in which the use of and monopoly over genetic information shape and influence population policies, environmental ethics and biomedical and agricultural practices in various Asian religious and secular cultures and across national boundaries.

The past decade has seen a rapid increase in the intra-Asia flow of brides, particularly between Southeast and East Asia.

While in Europe intermediated marriages continue to be seen as a form of the commodification of women, recent scholarship in intra-Asia cross-border marriages challenges this dominant view.

Coordinator: Margaret Sleeboom-Faulkner m.sleeboom@wanadoo.nl

Syntax of the languages of southern China This project aims to achieve a detailed description and in-depth analysis of a limited number of syntactic phenomena in six languages, both Sinitic and non-Sinitic, spoken in the area south of the Yangtze River. The project will systematically compare these descriptions and analyses to contribute to the development of the theory of language and human language capacity.

Coordinator: Rint Sybesma r.p.e.sybesma@let.leidenuniv.nl

Coordinator: Melody Lu m.lu @let.leidenuniv.nl

Piracy and robbery on the Asian seas Acts of piracy loom large in Asian waters, with the bulk of all officially reported incidents of maritime piracy occurring in Southeast Asia during the 1990s. This is of serious concern to international shipping, as the sea-lanes between East Asia, the Middle East, and Europe pass through Southeast Asia.

IIAS and the Centre for Maritime Research at the University of Amsterdam are currently identifying issues and concerns, and are delineating core elements of an interdisciplinary research programme on piracy and robbery at sea in Asia.

Coordinators: Wim Stokhof and John Kleinen kleinen@uva.nl

Trans-Himalayan database development: China and the subcontinent (Phase I) The project’s main goal is to combine the database of cognate words in Tibeto-Burman languages, maintained by the

This masterclass intends to present an overview of previous and current research on past environmental change in Asia, and to foreshadow future research trajectories. It will focus on interaction between people and the ­n atural environment, and ways in which paleo-environmental research can compliment archaeological studies.

Also presenting:

Geoff Hope (Dept. of Archaeology and Natural History, Australian National University) Sander van der Kaars (Monash University, Australia) Christophe Pottier (Directeur de Mission/Researcher, L’EFEO, Siem Reap, Cambodia) Deadline for registration:

15 July 2006 Information:

International Institute for Asian Studies Manon Osseweijer PO Box 9515 2300 RA Leiden The Netherlands T +31 (0)71 527 2227 F +31 (0)71 527 4162 m.osseweijer@let.leidenuniv.nl Registration at www.iias.nl

For more information on IIAS research: www.iias.nl

IIAS Newsletter | #41 | Summer 2006

31

> ASEF/Alliance Asia Alliance The European Alliance for Asian Studies is a cooperative framework of European institutes specializing in Asian Studies. Its partners are:

NIAS - Nordic Institute of Asian Studies Director: Dr Jørgen Delman Leifsgade 33 DK 2300 Copenhagen S, Denmark T +45-35-32 9500 F +45-35-32 9549 sec@nias.ku.dk www.nias.ku.dk

Voices of Islam in Europe and Southeast Asia The ‘central and most dangerous dimension of the emerging global politics’ revolves around ‘civilizational identities’, warned political scientist and former US State Department adviser Samuel Huntington in his seminal article in Foreign Affairs. ‘The fault lines between civilisations are replacing the political and ideological boundaries of the Cold War as the flashpoints for crisis and bloodshed.’ 1

IFA Institute of Asian Studies Director: Dr Günter Schücher GIGA German Institute of Global and Area Studies Rothenbaumchaussee 32, 20148 Hamburg, Germany T +49-40-428 8740 F +49-40-410 7945 ifa@giga-hamburg.de www.giga-hamburg.de

EIAS European Institute for Asian Studies Director: Dr Willem van der Geest 35 Rue des Deux Eglises, 1000 Brussels, Belgium T +32-2-230 8122 F +32-2-230 5402 eias@eias.org www.eias.org

CERI - Sciences Po Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques Director: Prof. Christophe Jaffrelot 56 rue Jacob, 75006 Paris, France T +33-1-58717000 F +33-1-58717090 info@ceri-sciences-po.org www.ceri-sciencespo.com

CEAO Centro de Estudios de Asia Oriental Director: Prof. Taciana Fisac Centro de Estudios de Asia Oriental Universidad Autonoma de Madrid Campus de Cantoblanco 28049 Madrid, Spain T +34-91-397 4695 F +34-91-397 5278 ceao@uam.es www.uam.es/otroscentros/ asiaoriental/especifica/

SOAS School of Oriental and African Studies Director: Prof. Colin Bundy University of London Thornhaugh Street / Russel Square, London, WC1H 0XG, United Kingdom T +44-20-7637 2388 F +44-20-7436 3844 study@soas.ac.uk www.soas.ac.uk

SSAAPS The Swedish School of Advanced Asia Pacific Studies Director: Prof. Thommy Svensson The STINT Foundation, Skeppargatan 8, 114 52 Stockholm, Sweden T +46-70-6355160 F +46-8-6619210 thommy.svensson@telia.com www.ssaaps.stint.se

IIAS (secretariat Asia Alliance)

www.asia-alliance.org 32

ASEF-Alliance Workshop, Nakhon Si Thammarat, Thailand, 20-22 January 2006 Cy n t h i a C h o u a n d P a t r i c k J o r y

I

nternational conflict in the post-September 11 world seemed to confirm this forecast and fuelled western anxieties of the Muslim world, giving currency to theories rooting conflict in the polarisation of Muslims and the West. The workshop ‘Voices of Islam in Europe and Southeast Asia’ aimed to dispute unitary characterisations of Islam’s civilisational identity; to address Islam beyond the Middle Eastern domain; and to hear the myriad voices of Islam to deepen our understanding of the Muslim world’s diversity.

Particularly outside the Islamic world, September 11th 2001 sparked unprecedented interest in Muslims, Islam and Islamic studies. In Europe it intensified the attention to Islam resulting from an increasingly large Muslim population.

Dutch film-maker Theo van Gogh’s murder, after the summer 2004 airing of his film Submission on Dutch television, spawned debates on Islam and accommodating Muslim immigrants. Meanwhile, in Southeast Asia, an Islamic revivalist movement dating back to the 1970s, and separatist movements whose ideologies are expressed in Islamic terms, extolled Islam’s contemporary importance. In Indonesia, the country with the world’s largest Muslim population, Islam in politics and society has effloresced three decades after the downfall of General Suharto and his New Order regime.

Fittingly, the workshop was held in southern Thailand, where a violent insurgency in the ethnic Malay majority border provinces has claimed over a thousand lives over the last two years, heightening tensions between the Muslim population and the Thai state. Some observers believe the conflict’s intensification stems from the infiltration of foreign Islamists and their extremist discourses. It was a fitting milieu in which to address the urgency of Islamic studies.

Education and citizenship What resonated throughout the workshop was how Islam and being Muslim have dominated public debates over education, citizenship, community and political orientation. The workshop opened with presentations on the conceptualisation, definition and interpretation of what constitutes Islamic studies and education. In Southeast Asia, governments and media have traced Muslim extremist ideology to Islamic educational institutions and pressured

IIAS Newsletter | #41 | Summer 2006

them to demonstrate their ‘moderate’ Islamic credentials and relevance to national development goals, especially how they provide their students with employable skills.

Islamic education in Europe is no less controversial. It must cater to Muslim migrants seeking to retain their Islamic identity in a ‘foreign’ environment, home to a generally non-Muslim public seeking to understand Islam in an era when religions – even ‘civilisations’ – are intensely politicized. The need to dispel the unitary characterisation of Islam in Islamic studies in Europe is crucial, and while many Islamic studies and education programmes exist in Denmark, Germany and the Netherlands, these tend to focus on the Middle East and pay little attention to Muslims in Europe or Southeast Asia.

Workshop presentations by scholars of Islamic studies and education in Southeast Asia dismissed the view of the region as a potential hotbed of Islamist terrorism or battleground for a ‘war of ideas’. Such criticism is far too general, researchers argued, because it overlooks Islamic education’s varying role, content and standards from country to country. Muslim-minority areas of Cambodia, the southern Philippines and southern Thailand have a relatively disadvantaged state of Islamic education, particularly in madrasahs, compared to their counterparts in the Muslim majority countries of Indonesia, Malaysia and Brunei. The latter possess greater material resources and a richer variety of approaches to studying Islam, and have integrated the social sciences with Islamic studies to a much greater degree.

Islamic education has played a significant role in preserving ethnic identity, such as the Malay identity in southern Thailand. However, the far too generalized perception that extremist views are circulated via Islamic studies and education has pressured Southeast Asian Islamic institutions to reform their ‘traditional’ Islamic education.

This reduces their ability to preserve ethnic identities, as the decoupling of Islamic education from traditional culture sometimes leads to scriptualist interpretations lacking cultural contextualisation, and may also contribute to the so-called ‘Arabisation’ of Southeast Asian Islam, particularly in southern Thailand and Malaysia.

Workshop speakers emphasised the need to develop a ‘Southeast Asian Islam’ while reforming traditional

education. But what form of Southeast Asian Islam? Workshop participants from southern Thailand and Malaysia saw the ‘Islamisation of knowledge’ as a desirable project, while others argued that ‘all knowledge is already Islamic’.

New theories are required that account for the particularities of Muslim ‘social and cultural realities’.

Transnational Islam?

To show the Muslim world’s complexity, some presentations hinged on ‘Transnational Islam and Muslims’. Until about two decades ago, the transnational character of Islam and migrant Muslim populations received minimal attention. Today, European governments, politicians and media debate policies of accommodation, or more likely restriction, of migrant Muslims whose voices go unheard because of language barriers or the lack of participatory public forums.

Workshop researchers identified gaps in studies on transnational Islam and Muslims. Questions raised included: ‘How does movement through migration, exile and tourism ramify arguments concerning socio-cultural life and identity?’ ‘What are the challenges faced by migrant Muslims in Denmark, Germany or the Netherlands with respect to the interpretation of Islam in a new social cultural milieu?’ ‘What hurdles do they encounter with respect to the perceptions of Muslims in a non-Muslim society?’ ‘What are the challenges of religious pluralism versus the idea of a Muslim society?’

styles and express religious affiliations in all sorts of ways.

While they cannot be accurately perceived as a single world-wide community, transnational Muslims are inevitably bound together within the wider public landscape. In Europe, transnational Muslims are not perceived as apolitical cultural images. Negotiating cultural meanings, Muslims and non-Muslims alike vex over questions like, ‘What does it mean to be Muslim in Europe?’ or ‘How much does one have to accommodate Muslim symbols in the public arena?’ Transnational movement sometimes offers Muslims new resources to construct new identities; it can also increase tensions between different social orders. Transnational Islam and Muslims offer theoretical and empirical insight to the emerging multiple modernities of Islam and being Muslim.

The mutually beneficial interaction between Islamic Studies in Europe and Southeast Asia, and indeed between workshop Muslims and non-Muslims, refutes the popular argument of a ‘clash of civilisations’ between ‘Europe/the West and Islam’. Such interaction demands greater recognition. One week after the workshop, the cartoon controversy erupted in Denmark, spread to Asia and mushroomed into a transnational issue, demonstrating that the ‘Voices of Islam in Europe and Southeast Asia’ must be heard here and now. < Note 1. Huntington, Samuel P. 1993. ‘The Clash of

Does the transnational movement of Muslims transform them into a single globalised community? The answer is an emphatic no. Rejecting a totalising view of transnationalism, workshop participants were drawn to the imaginings of the individual in the large-scale cross-border flow of people, images and cultural forces. For economic or political reasons, transnational Muslims might live in one nation-state yet engage in more than one national agenda. The everyday lives of transnational Muslims reflect great diversity. They adopt life-

Civilizations?’ Foreign Affairs 72, p.29.

Cynthia Chou Department of Cross-cultural and Regional Studies University of Copenhagen Denmark cynchou@hum.ku.dk Patrick Jory

Regional Studies Program School of Liberal Arts, Walailak University Thailand jpatrick@wu.ac.th

This workshop was co-organised by the Department of Cross-cultural and Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen, Denmark, and the Regional Studies Program, School of Liberal Arts, Walailak University, Thailand. It was made possible by a generous award from the AsiaEurope Foundation and the European Alliance of Asian Studies, with additional assistance from the Rockefeller Foundation (Southeast Asia Regional Program), the Royal Netherlands Embassy (Bangkok), the Japan Foundation (Bangkok), Walailak University and the University of Copenhagen. The workshop brought together 30 specialists from 15 countries in Europe and Southeast Asia before an audience of 200.

> Alliance/ICAS

Asia-Europe Workshop Series Update 2006/2007 A

sia needs to be studied, not in isolation, but as part of the wider world, focusing on themes that are contemporary, innovative and interdisciplinary, but also of perennial human interest: society and technology, migration, media, development, governance, environment, the history of the arts and ideas. The topics selected by the Asia-Europe Workshop Series are not restricted to the humanities and social sciences, nor limited to study by academics. Many straddle the line between pure and applied research. As knowledge is inclusive – and is furthered in unpredictable ways – we recognize the role of practitioners and policymakers in furthering debate.

The Asia-Europe Workshop Series, sponsored by the Asia-Europe Foundation and the European Alliance for Asian Studies, received 47 proposals for its 2006/2007 round. The selection committee met in Singapore on 12 April 2006 to select six workshops for realization. The committee consisted of Jean-Luc Domenach (Tsinghua University), Chung-si Ahn (Seoul National University), Jean-François Sabouret (Centre National de Recherche Scientifique), Victor Savage (National University of Singapore), Hanns Maull (University of Trier), Shamsul A.B. (University Kebangsaan Malaysia), Thommy Svensson (Swedish School of Advanced Asia Pacific Studies), Bertrand Fort (ASEF) and Wim Stokhof (Asia Alliance/ IIAS). The selected workshops will be listed in a later issue of IIAS Newsletter.

Jiang Lidong

International Convention of Asia Scholars 5 Call for Panels and Papers Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia 2-5 August 2007 ICAS Book Series The ICAS Book Series is a new feature of ICAS. The first volumes will be published in 2006. The series welcomes edited volumes and monographs which are the outcome of panels at ICAS. For more information please contact the ICAS Secretariat. www.icassecretariat.org

ICAS Book Prizes ICAS Book Prizes, established in 2004, were awarded last year to Elizabeth C. Economy (social sciences), Christopher Reed (humanities) and Samuel KwokFu Wong (best PhD). We now invite all Asian Studies books published in 2005 and 2006 to compete for the 2007 prizes. Three prizes will be awarded: 1. best study in the humanities; 2. best study in the social sciences; 3. best PhD in Asian Studies. Prize money consists of euro 2,500 for categories 1 and 2. The best PhD thesis will be published. Publishers and PhD students are welcome to enter their books by sending six copies to the ICAS Secretariat in Leiden, the Netherlands, before 31 December 2006.

The International Convention of Asia Scholars has established itself as one of the largest biennial gatherings for Asia scholars to meet and discuss new developments in their fields. Previous conventions were held in Leiden (1998), Berlin (2001), Singapore (2003) and Shanghai (2005), drawing an average of 1,200 participants from over 50 countries.

ICAS 5 will be hosted by the Institute of Occidental Studies (IKON) and the Institute of Malay World and Civilization (ATMA), Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, and will be held in the Kuala Lumpur Conference Centre opposite the landmark Petronas Towers. We expect over 1,500 Asian Studies specialists to converge on Kuala Lumpur for ICAS 5: Sharing a Future in Asia. The organizing committee is pleased to invite proposals for panels and topics.

ICAS 5 will also serve as the occasion to award the ICAS Book Prizes.

Information and registration ICAS 5 ICAS 5 Host c/o IKON-ATMA Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia 43600 UKM BANGI, MALAYSIA info@icas5kl.com www.icas5kl.com

Submission of abstracts for panels and papers Institutions, researchers and PhD ­students are invited to submit abstracts for: • Institutional panels • Organized panels • Individual papers Abstracts and ­presentations should be in English. Submission of abstracts for panels and papers can be made through ICAS 5 registration forms available online.

Deadlines Deadline individual submissions: 15 November 2006 Notice of acceptance: 15 December 2006 Deadline organized and institutional panels: 15 December 2006 Notice of acceptance: 15 January 2007

Financial support Financial support for travel and ­lodging will be made available to PhD‑students and young academics. For details see the website.

Exhibition space

General Information on ICAS & ICAS Books ICAS Secretariat c/o IIAS P.O. Box 9515, 2300 RA Leiden The Netherlands icas@let.leidenuniv.nl www.icasecretariat.org

There will be an exhibition of Asian Studies books. Please contact us.

www.icas5kl.com

ICAS depends on voluntary ­contributions. Find out more about ­supporting ICAS at www.icassecretariat.org.

IIAS Newsletter | #41 | Summer 2006

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> Announcements in which â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;the Westâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; exerts influence upon â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;the Restâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;. In contrast, the Queer Asian Sites conference will focus on the importance of intra-regional flows of people, knowledge, representation and capital in the histories and contemporary forms of queer cultures and communities in the region. The questions we hope the conference will explore include:

Asia Europe Peopleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Forum 6 Helsinki, Finland 3-6 September 2006 How does the privatisation of public services, the connection between nuclear energy and nuclear weapons, and the marginalization of majorities affect your life â&#x20AC;&#x201C; and the life of your Asian and European friends?

The AEPF is a forum for non-state and non-corporate NGOs and civil society groups aiming to bring the voice of the civil society to the official Asia Europe Summit, ASEM, and to create alternatives to its neo-liberal agenda. The AEPF was created in 1996 and has held forums every second year parallel to the ASEM summit. AEPF forums engage civil societies in both Asia and Europe to discuss common issues with an Asia-Europe dimension. www.aepf.net

â&#x20AC;˘ What is the legacy of the prewar Japanese occupation on Taipei and Seoulâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s same-sex and transgender cultures? â&#x20AC;˘ How has the Confucian culture of the economically and politically important immigrant Chinese communities in countries such as Thailand, the Philippines, and Malaysia impacted upon forms of sexual knowledge, representation, and queer lifestyles? â&#x20AC;˘ What impact does gay and lesbian tourism, both from the West and within Asia and the Pacific, have upon identities and practices? â&#x20AC;˘ How are Asian and Pacific diasporic identities negotiated in Western queer cultural centres such as Sydney, Melbourne, and Auckland? â&#x20AC;˘ How important is the expansion and cross-border transfer of queer capital â&#x20AC;&#x201C; the pink dollar, the purple baht, the lavender yuan, the rainbow rupee â&#x20AC;&#x201C; to the public legitimation of LGBTQ communities in Asia, Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific?

Please send abstracts of no more than 250 words to: apq@anu.edu.au Information on registration and accommodation will be posted on the AsiaPAcifiQueer website: http://apq.anu.edu.au/

Queer Asian Sites

Farsi/English periodical online

International Conference of Asian Queer Studies 22-23 February 2007 Sydney, Australia

Pages is interested in cultural productions that communicate the specific sociopolitical conditions and circumstances in which they are produced. Being a bilingual magazine forces Pages into constant rethinking of its position. It searches for ways to surpass predefined and geographically bound discourses of subjectivity and locality, and tries to point to those intricacies and dissonances within local currents that give way to alternative chains of meanings, relations and coincidences.

We are happy to announce the launch of our new website at where you can read previous issues and navigate through all of Pagesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; activities. We specifically invite you to join our bilingual Forum discussions, and contribute to the Daily Pages, an online platform of Pages magazine.

Pages P.O. Box 23354 3001 KJ Rotterdam, the Netherlands Fax:+31(0)102132181 info@pagesmagazine.net www.pagesmagazine.net

Radcliffe fellowships for artists, humanists and social scientists Deadline: 2 October 2006 Radcliffe Institute fellowships are designed to support scholars, scientists, artists, and writers who wish to pursue work in academic and professional fields and in the creative arts. The Radcliffe Institute sustains a continuing commitment to the study of women, gender, and society, though applicantsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; projects need not focus on gender. We seek to build a community of fellows that is diverse in every way and encourage people from all over the world to apply. www.radcliffe.edu/fellowships/apply

Call for Papers Abstract deadline: 31 August 2006 The conference will investigate the importance of intra-regional networks and interactions amongst queer cultures and communities in Asia, Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific. English-language research has tended to understand the emergence of new LGBTQ identities in the region in terms of a â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;West and the Restâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; model of globalisation based on a one-way process

Pages began in February 2004 by publishing a bilingual Farsi/English periodical pursuing exchange between Iranian and international authors and artists with critical views on art, culture, urbanism and social issues. Following its second issue, Pages began to develop collaborative projects with practitioners in different cultural fields. Its activities transcended the magazine format into other layouts â&#x20AC;&#x201C; installation, video essays, workshops and presentations.

Study in Japan â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Study in Japan: Comprehensive Guideâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; is a website operated by the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs to provide information on studying in Japan. It contains useful information for prospective, current and former students, and is available in Japanese, English, Chinese and Korean. www.studyjapan.go.jp

Civil society and local governance in Japan New research project OECD countries are facing increasing unemployment, falling tax revenues, rapidly aging populations and insecurity over social security systems. Almost all are redefining relationships between central and local government, citizens and state.

In Japan since the mid-90s, and especially since the decentralization reform package of 2000, we observe the following mutually reinforcing changes: (1) Power shift away from the centre, leading to greater co-operation between administrations, citizens, and corporations, especially in environmental politics, social welfare and urban development; (2) Improved conditions for citizen participation through new legislation, such as the NGO law; (3) Increased citizen participation, in NGOs, local referendums, and citizen networks.

Our project â&#x20AC;&#x201C; â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Civil Society in Japan: Partnership as a New Item of Japanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Local Politicsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; â&#x20AC;&#x201C; will analyse interaction between local administrations, NGOs, local politicians and other local actors, their competences, and conflict between them. Our case studies on environmental politics, social welfare, and urban development will determine whether the new interaction between citizens and political and administrative systems is leading to improved problem-solving at the local level and to greater democracy through citizen participation.

The project is based at the department of Japanese Studies at Martin-Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg, and is financed by the German Research Foundation (DFG).

Participants include Gesine Foljanty-Jost, Carmen Schmidt and Karoline Haufe.

Contact: Carmen Schmidt Deputy Director, Japan Research Center CESchmidt01@aol.com

Indian Association for Asian & Pacific Studies

The Indian Association for Asian & Pacific Studies promotes research, conference/ seminar/ lecture programs and the understanding of cultures, societies, politics and economics in different Asian & Pacific regions. The Association is a forum for scholars engaged in inter-regional and inter-societal comparative social science.

The Third Biennial International Conference will be a meeting point for scholars working on Asian & Pacific studies from South Asia, Southeast Asia and China.

The conference aims to develop a new network between Asia fellows and Indian scholars.

Contact: Lipi Ghosh, University of Calcutta 1, Reformatory Street, Kolkata 700027 + 91-33-24544739 iaaps.iaaps@gmail.com

International Symposium on Asia-Pacific Studies 15-17 November 2006 Havana City, Cuba Call for papers Deadline: 31 October 2006 The Center for Studies on Asia and Oceania (CEAO) invites you to the International Symposium on Asia Pacific Studies. Our first convocation will address contemporary economic developments and political and security trends in the Asia-Pacific region.

For further information please contact: Ana Delia Soltura Center for Studies on Asia and Oceania 20 Street and 7ma. avenue.

Miramar, Playa Havana City. Cuba P. C. 11 300 Phone 206 6131 / 202 8392-94 ext 102 Fax (537) 202 60 38 anadelia@ceao.co.cu isael@ceao.co.cu

Asian American Urbanism and Interracial Encounters

Third Biennial International Conference 13-15 October 2006 Gwalior, India

2007 Association for Asian American Studies Conference 4 -8 April 2007 New York City

Call for papers/ abstracts/ submissions Deadline: 30 July 2006

Call for papers Deadline: 31 October 2006

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34

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> Announcements This meeting explores cosmopolitanism in Asian American life, and the multiple and shifting identities, attachments, and worldviews of Asian Americans and those with whom they interact. As the world’s financial center and the hub of the nation’s publishing and fashion industries and artistic scene, New York has drawn both exceptional individuals of Asian ancestry, including writers, scholars, painters, musicians and dancers, and masses of workers. The port of New York serves as a continuing place of welcome for Asian entrants and a point of transnational contact, transit and supply.

We seek panels, papers, workshops, roundtables and teaching sessions that explore the presence of Asian Americans in New York City and other urban environments – downtown, boroughs and suburbs alike – and their experience within the various places and institutions that characterize city life: theaters, prisons, offices, museums, factories, streets, mass transit, schools and universities, restaurants, and tourist sites. We especially encourage papers that explore the correlations and interactions between the experiences of Asian Americans and those of other groups and communities that make up the urban landscape, notably African Americans (including Caribbean Blacks); Latinos; Jews; Arab/Muslim Americans; Irish, Slavic, and Italian Americans; Gays/ Lesbians; and evangelical Christians.

In addition to paper proposals, we invite panel proposals as well as workshops, roundtables, and teaching sessions that explore ways of historicizing, contextualizing, and critiquing the impact of urban life and interactions on the Asian American experience.

Stephanie Hsu ssh13@cornell.edu www.aaastudies.org/call.tpl

wanted asia studies: preferably alive

ASiA, a joint endeavour of the University of Amsterdam and the International Institute for Asian Studies, promotes the study of Asia through research and outreach in the Amsterdam region. We aim to increase Amsterdam’s contact with researchers in and from Asia, as well as introduce contemporary Asian expressions, developments and experiences to the wider public. All individuals and institutions, academic and nonacademic, interested in co-operating with ASiA are invited to contact project manager Sikko Visscher at s.visscher@fmg.uva.nl

ASiA facilitates research within the theme ‘Making a Living in a Transnational World: Asian Perspectives on Globalisation’, based on two research projects at the University of Amsterdam. ‘Asia and Europe Compared’, headed by Mario Rutten, comparatively addresses social inequality, views and behaviour of the middle classes, labour relations and informalization in Europe and Asia, and aims to provide a fairer assessment of Asia’s role in the world today. ‘Illegal but Licit: Transnational Flows and Permissive Polities in Asia’ (IBL), headed by Willem van Schendel and Li Minghuan, consists of four projects analysing current migration in their legal and social contexts. For more information on IBL please see http://www.nwo.nl/nwohome.nsf/pages/NWOP_6FCJXB_Eng. Van Schendel is the guest editor of a forthcoming special issue of the IIAS Newsletter on this topic. For upcoming events, see:

www.iias.nl/asia

IIAS Network www.iias.nl/portal is an open platform for visitors to place information on events, grants and funding, job opportunities, and websites. You can subscribe to the Network at the address above and stay up to date through regular RSS feeds. Event information posted on IIAS Network will be considered for publication in this newsletter’s International Conference Agenda.

IIAS Newsletter welcomes unsolicited contributions from readers around the world. Please address your copy or queries to its editors, Takeo David Hymans and Natasja Kershof, at iiasnews@let.leidenuniv.nl Our guideline for contributors, upcoming deadlines, information for advertisers, and current and previous issues can be accessed at www.iias.nl

Chinese Radio Amsterdam Monday to Friday, 9 pm to 10 pm FM 99.4 or cable FM 104.6 Amsterdam area: Monday and Tuesday in Mandarin, Wednesday to Friday in Cantonese Postbus 15809 1001 NH Amsterdam 020-6208866 (call during the program) chineseradioamsterdam@msn.com

Siksacakr: Journal of the Center for Khmer Studies Siksacakr welcomes articles related to Khmer and Southeast Asian Studies. Articles must be either in Khmer, English or French. Accepted articles are published in their original language and translated into Khmer. A new on-line version for shorter articles comes out every six months.

Contact: Michel Rethy Antelme, Editor-in-Chief siksacakr@khmerstudies.org

Chinese Cultures Abroad Directory

New Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity:

The Chinese Cultures Abroad Directory wishes to receive URLs and, if you wish, your evaluation of websites in any language by or about Overseas Chinese (however defined). The Directory is part of the China WWW Virtual Library and the Asian Studies WWW Virtual Library. Vincent K. Pollard is the editor. pollard@hawaii.edu

www.unesco.org/culture/intangible heritage/35eur_uk.htm

www2.hawaii.edu/~pollard / participation.html

Oral masterpieces online

[ a d v e r t i s e m e n t ]

NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF SINGAPORE SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES PROGRAMME

ASSISTANT PROFESSORSHIP IN SOUTH ASIAN RELIGIONS AND CULTURES The South Asian Studies Programme in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the National University of Singapore is seeking to appoint a tenure-track Assistant Professor.

The Programme wishes to appoint a scholar with a strong theoretical grounding in South Asian Religions and Cultures. The appointee will be expected to teach and develop multi-disciplinary undergraduate modules in these areas, supervise graduate research and build up the research profile of the Programme. For this position an ability to handle primary source materials in a classical or modern South Asian language is essential. Extensive experience in the field, or archival work is desirable. Teaching and curriculum development experience would be an advantage.

Applicants must submit (1) a full vita; (2) a statement detailing their research agendas and professional experience; and (3) contributions he/ she can make towards this appointment. (4) In addition, applicants must arrange for three academic referees to write recommendations on their behalf. The deadline for all these submissions is 31 July 2006, and all materials should be sent to Chair, South Asian Studies Programme Search Committee Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, National University of Singapore 3 Arts Link, Singapore 117569 Tel: (65) 6516 4528, Fax: (65) 67770616, Email: sasbox2@nus.edu.sg Suitable candidates will be invited to make campus visits in September/October 2006, with a view to the appointment starting, if possible, in January 2007.

Please visit the South Asian Studies Programme website at http://www.fas.nus.edu.sg/sas and the Faculty website at http:// www.fas.nus.edu.sg/

IIAS Newsletter | #41 | Summer 2006

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IIAS Newsletter | #41 | Summer 2006

Royal Ontario Museum Herman Herzog Levy Gallery, 100 Queen’s Park Toronto, Ontario T +416 586 8000 www.rom.on.ca/exhibitions/special/gisan.php

Canada

Until 10 September 2006 Mountains and Streams: Chinese Paintings from the Asian Collection This exhibition, including more than 40 works, explores the period from the 14th century until the present day and examines the worship of mountains as sacred places in China.

NGV International 180 St Kilda Road Melbourne, Victoria T +61 3 8620 2222 www.ngv.vic.gov.au/ngvinternational

Until 27 August 2006 Biennial Theme: Zones of Contact Zones of Contact is about the spaces people live in and move between: the spatial dimensions of cities, settlements, territories, the land and home. Using painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, fabric and stitching, photography, video, film, performance or voice and sound, the artists explore local and trans-cultural encounters. Includes works by Asian artists Hamra Abbas, Weiwei Ai, Anas Al-Shaikh, Navjot Altaf, Ghada Amer, Alfredo Juan Aquilizan, Maria Isabel Aquilizan, Zarina Bhimji, Fei Cao, Chiehjen Chen, Dain-Iskandar Said, Ghazel, Shilpa Gupta, Guttierez + Portefaix, Mona Hatoum, Amar Kanwar, Xiaodong Liu, Qing Lu, Almagul Menlibayeva, Hayati Mokhtar, Daido Moriyama, Tomoko Mukaiyama, Milenko Prvacki, Tawatchai Puntusawasdi, Yufen Qin, Raqs Media Collective, Ranjani Shettar, Tabaimo, Kei Takemura, Fiona Tan, Kaisyng Tan, Sunok U, Muneteru Ujino, Savanhdary Vongpoothorn, Viktor Vorobyev, Yelena Vorobyeva and Akram Zaatari.

Until 19 July 2006 Auspicious Emblems: Chinese Cultural Treasures – 45th Anniversary Exhibition of the Min Chiu Society The exhibition features a wide variety of media including Chinese paintings and calligraphy, jade, ceramics, glass, lacquer and enamel

Hong Kong Museum of Art 10 Salisbury Road, Tsim Sha Tsui, Kowloon T +852 2721 0116 www.lcsd.gov.hk/CE/Museum/Arts

Until 25 July 2006 The Intention of the Public/A Contemporary Art Exhibition Contemporary culture and modern media create new environments. Public performance is a part of modern life and can be seen anywhere. This ‘Dummy World’ shapes public thought. These works try to investigate the world. They are alternative versions of our real lives and at the same time they contribute to our lives. Includes works by Shujun Guo, Xuebin Huang, Jun Liu, Huijian Shi, Haoduo Tang, Yuanming Wang, Xiaofei Wang, Fen Weng and Xianwen Xie.

RedSkyArt Space 5F Zhenxin Building No.37 Renmin Road HaiDian Haikou City T +133 22030040 www.redsky-hk.com

China

Until 15 October 2006 Work from China This exhibition is part of the 22nd International Biennale of Graphic Design Brno 2006.

Projects, opinions, and trends in graphic design meet here from all over the world.

Moravian Gallery, Museum of Applied Arts Husova 18, Brno T +420 532 169 111 www.moravska-galerie.cz/en/exhibitions/ work-from-china

Czech Republic

Until 30 September 2006 Korea Around 1900: The Paintings of Gisan Gim Gisan’s work is of a documentary style, focusing on common people’s daily lives.

Gisan documented a time in Korea’s history when the 400-year-old feudal society was disintegrating and foreign infiltration was changing the port cities of the time. Approximately 50 watercolour and ink paintings are on display in this exhibition, alongside artefacts from the ROM’s Far Eastern collections.

Until 24 July 2006 The Very Rich Hours of the Court of China: Masterpieces from Qing Imperial Painting Many exceptional painted handscrolls from the Guimet will be available for public viewing for the first time. These sumptuously-coloured handscrolls record imperial orders intended to celebrate outstanding events of the reign of three Qing sovereigns: Kangxi (1662-1723), Yongzheng (1723-1736) and Qianlong (17361796). The exhibition will explore the interaction of Chinese and western art traditions through the works of Jesuit artist Giuseppe Castiglione (Lang Shining), an official painter

National Museum of Asian Art – Guimet 6 Place d’Iéna 75016 Paris T +01-56 52 53 0 www.museeguimet.fr

France

Until 30 September 2006 Long March Capital The exhibition will display a variety of contemporary Chinese art from different periods, mediums and subject matter and will feature a seasonal rotating display. Currently featured artists include: Chen Qiulin, Chen Xiaoyun, Deng Dafei, Guo Fengyi, He Jinwei, Hong Hao, Jiang Jie, Li Zhenhua, Lin Tianmiao, Liu Liping, Liu Wei, Ma Liuming, Qin Ga, Song Yonghong, Wang Jingsong, Wang Mai, Xiao Xiong, Yu Hong, Zhan Wang, Zhang Hui and Zhuang Hui.

Long March Space A 798 Art District, Jiuxianqiao Rd #4, Chaoyang District Mailbox 8503, Beijing, 100015 T +86 (0)10 6438 7107 www.longmarchspace.com

Until 4 September 2006 Mega Crossover – 4 X Home Hong Kong Design Series: Exhibition III. Creative talents from different disciplines have been attracted to home design. Adopting a crossover approach with four renowned local creative minds – Mathias Woo, Wing Shya, Eric Kot and Tsao Chip – guest curator Douglas Young sets out to inspire audiences with exceptional visions in imaginative home representation.

Hong Kong Heritage Museum 1 Man Lam Road, Sha Tin, Hong Kong T +852 2180 8188 www.heritagemuseum.gov.hk/english

Hara Museum of Contemporary Art 4-7-25 Kitashinagawa, Shinagawa-ku Tokyo 140-0001 T +81 3 3280-0679 www.haramuseum.or.jp Until 27 August 2006 Yoroyoron Tabaimo’s animated video installations have received much critical attention. The exhibition features large-scale installations such as public conVENience, midnight sea and guignorama as well as drawings. The title Yoroyoron was coined by the artist from the Japanese words ‘yoro yoro’, which means to totter or stagger, and ‘yoron’ which means public opin-

Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum of Ethnography Ubierring 45, Cologne T +49 221 336940 www.museenkoeln.de/english/rautenstrauchjoest-museum/ 2 July 2006-16 January 2007 Deities Living on Earth: Folk and Tribal ­Traditions in India Showing people celebrating their festivals and rituals and mediums acting in trance, the 56 photographs provide an insight into regional tradition that remain part of the country’s cultural heritage. Two films and numerous bronze sculptures from rural India complement this exhibition.

Museum of the Terracotta Warriors and Horses of Qin Shihuangdi

Shihuangdi, Shaanxi Province

Museum of the Terracotta Warriors and Horses of Qin

cm and 195 x 55 x 90 cm

China, First Emperor Qin Shihuangdi (Qinling)Tomb 221-206 v. Chr., Qin-Dynasty Terracotta, 174 x 240 x 45

Tokyo Art Museum(TAM) 1-25-1, Sengawa-cho, Chofu Tokyo www.shimizuoffice.com/twomountains

Until 22 July 2006 at/@ Mapping Project in Kodaira Kazz Sasaguchi and Yasushi Noguchi scan Kodaira and map the area through their own perspectives and in their own ways. Although Kodaira is often seen as a university town, a part of ‘Musashino’, an area beloved by writers, or a commuter town, the two artists attempt to grasp some of the latent facets of the town.

Shiraya Art Space 1-4-12 Misono-cho, Kodaira-shi, Tokyo T +042 341 0235 http://a-i-t.net/jp/kodaira

Japan

Opened 22 May 2006 Iranian Contemporary Photographers: Silver Windows A selection of works by Iranian contemporary photographers, demonstrates their creativity not only in innovative photography, but also in the categories where they are most active and reputed in Iran and abroad.

Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art North Karegar Ave., Tehran T +98 21 88955754 www.tehranmoca.com/en/index.aspx

Iran

Until 30 July 2006 Two Mountains Two photographers, Naoya Hatakeyama and Balthasar Burkhard, composed a commissioned work about Swiss and Japanese mountains. Hatakeyama’s photographic sensibilities result from his observation of objects to establish a close personal relationship with each one. Burkhard is known for his objective photographs showing impressive physical aspects of the world.

Saddled and bridled horse with chariot harnass

Until 23 July 2006 Xian – Imperial Power in the Afterlife: Burial Goods and Temple Treasures from China’s Ancient Capital This exhibition presents recent archaeological discoveries from the necropolis surrounding the city of Xian. The exhibition opens with the unification under Qin Shihuangdi, but encompasses the Qin, Han, and Tang dynasties (221 BCE-907 CE). In addition to around 200 objects from the funerary complexes and temple furnishings, technology is used to introduce the area and highlights its importance.

Art and Exhibition Hall of the Federal Republic of Germany Friedrich-Ebert-Allee 4, 53113 Bonn T +49(0)228 9179 247 www.bundeskunsthalle.de

Germany

for the Emperor Qianlong. More than 100 works from the Ming and Qing dynasties will be presented, including monochrome scrolls and album sheets, paintings on fans, engravings, porcelain, albums of imperial seals and works dealing with perspective.

Arts agenda

Biennial of Sydney 2006 Venues: Pier 2/3 at Walsh Bay, Art Gallery of New South Wales and Museum of Contemporary Art, along with Artspace, Australian Centre for Photography, Blacktown Arts Centre, Campbelltown Arts Centre, Gallery 4a, Hyde Park Barracks, Ivan Dougherty Gallery, Museum of Sydney, National Art School, Performance Space, Tin Sheds at the University of Sydney, Sydney College of the Arts and the Sydney Opera House www.bos2006.com

Australia

Ca r o l B r a s h

> International arts agenda

as well as carvings in bamboo, wood, ivory and horn. Over 200 objects are displayed in groups presenting themes that reflect and interpret the auspicious beliefs inherent in Chinese culture, such as the desire for longevity, good fortune, fertility, wealth and status.

Until 22 October 2006 Women from Tokyo & Paris The exhibition reveals the influence of 19thcentury Japanese prints and paintings by leading artists such as Eizan, Eisen and Kunisada,

Van Gogh Museum Museumplein P.O. Box 75366, 1070 AJ Amsterdam T +31 (0)20-570 52 52 www.vangoghmuseum.nl

Until 17 September 2006 Silver Wonders from the East: Filigree of the Tsars This exhibition presents a rediscovery in the rich collection of filigree assembled by Peter the Great and Catherine the Great. New research has allowed the original collection to be reconstructed from the many departments of the Hermitage. It consists of objects made in China, India and Indonesia made for the European market. Among the highlights are Catherine the Great’s two unique toilet sets, one from China and one from India. All pieces have Chinese and Indian motifs and ornaments.

The Hermitage Amsterdam Nieuwe Herengracht 14, Amsterdam T +31 (0)20 530 87 55 www.hermitage.nl

Netherlands

Until 30 September 2006 Tribal and Ethnic Costumes and Textiles The costumes and textiles from the minority tribes of southwest China are on loan from Teresa Coleman and Eric Boudot. The mountainous terrain of this area protected the culture and customs of indigenous peoples for thousands of years, preserving a wealth of diverse and original styles.

Silk Museum Bsous, Caza Aley Beirut T +(01) 744222

Lebanon

Until 10 September 2006 100 Years of Korean Art, Part II This exhibition takes a look at the flow of 20th century Korean art within social and cultural context. This second half will display works from the mid-1950s to the present day.

National Museum of Contemporary Art San 58-1 (Gwangmyeong-gil 209) Makgye-dong, Gwacheon-si, Gyeonggi T +82 2 2188 6000 www.moca.go.kr

Korea

ion. The title is thus a reference to the ‘wobbly, ambiguous and inconclusive state’ of the artist’s opinions.

> International arts agenda

IIAS Newsletter | #41 | Summer 2006

Wereldmuseum Rotterdam Willemskade 25, 3016 DM T +010 - 270 71 72 www.wereldmuseum.nl

Until 3 September 2006 China Contemporary This inter-disciplinary overview of China’s contemporary art, architecture and visual culture is a collaboration between three Rotterdam museums. It provides a platform for a new critical voice from the People’s Republic

Nederlands Architectuur Instituut, Museum Boymans van Beuningen and Nederlands Fotomuseum Rotterdam www.chinacontemporary.nl

Until 17 September 2006 Mysterious Celadon 100 masterpieces of celadon from China, Korea, Thailand, and Japan brought together from four national collections – the Rijks Museum in Amsterdam, the Gemeente Museum Den Haag, the Groninger Museum and those from the Princessehof. Ranging from olive colour or dark grey-green to a characteristic ice blue, the wares reveal the variety of decoration techniques as well as the shapes that were developed in various Asian countries. A number of contemporary examples will also be on view.

Het Princessehof National Museum of ­Ceramics Grote Kerkstraat 11 Leeuwarden 8911 DZ T +058-212-74-38 www.princessehof.nl/

Until 22 October 2006 Wonders of Imperial Japan: Meiji Art from the Khalili Collection A selection of 200 items from the Khalili collection, Meiji art (1868-1912). The remarkable quality of Japanese craftsmanship during this period had a significant influence on many artists, including Vincent van Gogh.

on paintings and especially lithographs by the Nabis (including Pierre Bonnard, Maurice Denis, Edouard Vuillard, Paul Elie Ranson and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec) and their circle. Japanese influences were not limited to the familiar aspects of so-called Japonism, such as the two-dimensional fields, cropped compositions and colour contrasts; Les Nabis also drew inspiration from the themes employed by Japanese artists. Besides paintings and prints, the exhibition also features objects such as kimonos, robes, toiletries and musical instruments, showing how women lived their everyday life. The show traces a woman’s day from early morning to late in the evening: dressing and putting on her make-up, her various daytime activities, and the bustle of nightlife.

Until 20 August 2006 The Fascination of Ceramics: Masterpieces of Modern Japanese Pottery from Gisela Freudenberg Collection The developments in Japanese ceramics since the height of Japonisme around 1900

Collections Baur, Musée des Arts d’Extrême-Orient 8 rue Munier-Romilly 1206 – Geneva T +41 22 704 32 82 http://collections-baur.ch/en/exhibitions/ upcoming

Switzerland

Dancer, 1946, Galo Ocampo Singapore Art Museum

Until 5 December 2006 Philippiniana Owing to the Year of Philippines – Spain 2006, Casa Asia and the Ministry of Culture present the exhibition Philippiniana, which analyses the colonial past and the global present of the Philippines. It includes a large display of art (paintings, sculptures, photography, cinema, video and installations) and documentation.

Centro Conde Duque c/ Conde Duque 9-11 28015 Madrid T +(34) 91-588-5834 www.munimadrid.es/condeduque/

Spain

Until 7 January 2007 Tibet and the 14 Dalai Lamas Depictions of the various Dalai Lamas since 1391 can be seen in paintings and images.

Historical documents, films and photos provide an image of these leaders. The exhibition provides information about Tibetan culture, the history of the country and Buddhism and devotes attention to the current political ­situation.

Until 29 October 2006 Eyefish@NTMFA A glittering fish swims with ease and grace amid a sea of DLP monitors in the museum lobby. Eyefish is a collective work created from Wen-Hao Huang, Alf Chang and Fujui Wang.

The audience and Eyefish look at each other

National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts 2, Sec. 1, Wu Chuan W. Road Taichung 403 T +886 4 2372 3552 www.tmoa.gov.tw

Taiwan

Park-Villa Rieter Until 31 December 2006 Vishnu: A Hindu Deity of Many Guises The exhibition of paintings from the 17th and 18th centuries gives an overview of the most important incarnations of the Hindu god Vishnu.

Haus zum Kiel Until 24 September 2006 Blue-White, East-West: One Trend This is an exhibition of blue and white ceramics from China, Persia, the Ottoman Empire and Northern Europe. Chinese blue and white porcelain with its appealing decor inspired foreign potters to imitate it and to come up with creations of their own. Between the 15th and 18th centuries the most beautiful ceramics were thus produced by Persian manufacturers, in the Turkish city of Iznik and in the potteries of Delft.

Museum Rietberg Zürich Gablerstrasse 15 Zurich T + 41 (0)44 206 31 31 www.rietberg.ch

Until 12 November 2006 Woven Gold: Metal Threads in Textile Art An exhibition providing an insight into the decorative forms, lustre effects, techniques, and materials used in the manufacture of precious textiles made of gold and silver from ancient times to the 18th century from China to Europe. Included are medieval gold cloths from China and Central Asia which reflect the changing tastes and the inventiveness of the craftsmen and artists.

Abegg-Stiftung Werner Abegg-Strasse 67 Riggisberg T +41 (0)31 808 12 01 www.abegg-stiftung.ch

have marked generations of potters, in the West and in the East. Gisela Freudenberg has brought together a collection of great diversity, expressing the characteristics of individual artists.

20 July-30 July 2006 Chen Qi This exhibition of 25 woodcut prints by the Nanjing-based artist Chen Qi between 19852002 concentrates on those works depicting objects described in intense detail, harking back to styles and elements of 18th century Chinese court painting. All are woodcuts printed from plywood blocks using traditional water-soluble colour onto Chinese xuan paper.

The Bankside Gallery 48 Hopton Street London T +020 7928 7521 www.banksidegallery.com

Sera: The Way of the Tibetan Monk A display of black and white photos providing a glimpse into the rarely seen world of the Buddhist community at the re-established Sera Jay Monastery, India.

Until 13 August 2006 Happiness & Blessings: Hidden Meanings in Chinese Art An exhibition illustrating symbolic motifs in Chinese art relating to the five happinesses: luck, prosperity, longevity, happiness and wealth.

The Museum of East Asian Art 12 Bennett Street Bath BA1 2QJ T +44-1225 464 640 www.bath.co.uk/museumeastasianart

United Kingdom

Until 28 August 2006 The Beauty of Painting and Calligraphy in Album Leaves In Chinese painting and calligraphy, the purpose of mounting works of art is for the ease and convenience of appreciation and storage.

This display of album leaves ranging from the 11th-20th centuries explores the aesthetic effect of this format. Due to its small size, the entire scene in a leaf can be seen at a glance, making it easier to understand the main idea and appreciate it. Despite the small space, there remains room for imagination This makes the album leaf an ideal microcosm to bring the viewer into the world of the artist’s mind.

The National Palace Museum 221 Chih-shan Rd. Sec 2, Taipei T +886 2 2881 2021 www.npm.gov.tw/index.htm

curiously, referencing the Zhuangzi story about understanding the joy of being a fish. It also symbolises that people can get together under a common idea without sacrificing their own individuality when surfing in the sea of the internet.

Until 24 September 2006 The Fabric of Life: Ikat Textiles of Indonesia Created by women and used by both sexes,

The Metropolitan Museum of Art 1000 Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street New York, New York 10028-0198 T +212 535 7710 www.metmuseum.org

Until 31 December 2006 Teapots and Butter Tubs: Tibetan Vessels Rare and historic containers from the museum’s collection highlight the food and drink of traditional Tibetan culture. The exhibition includes colourful photographs illustrating food and culinary customs.

338 Lighthouse Avenue Staten Island, New York T +718 987 3500 www.tibetanmuseum.org

Jacques Marchais Museum of Tibetan Art

Until 24 September 2006 On the Edge: Contemporary Chinese Artists Encounter the West This exhibition features bold, experimental works by 11 of China’s leading avant-garde artists. On the Edge explores the artists’ position in the global art world, which is focused on the West, as well as China’s political situation vis-a-vis the West. Works by Huang Yong Ping, Qiu Zhijie, Yan Lei, Xu Bing, Zhang Huan and other leading artists range from humorous commentary on the artists’ bumpy road to stardom, to political pieces, to thoughtful invitations to explore common ground between East and West. The exhibition features more than 20 works in a variety of media including paintings, prints, photographs, videos, mixedmedia installations, sculptures and interactive CD-ROM.

Indianapolis Museum of Art 4000 Michigan Road Indianapolis, IN 46208-3326 T +317-920-2660 www.ima-art.org

United States

Until 5 August 2006 M F Husain: Early Masterpieces 1950s-70s This exhibition will feature a selection of Husain’s paintings from the 1950s-70s representing the pinnacle of his art. Drawing upon well-known artistic conventions, myths and history, Husain connects with a wide audience. Subjects include dancers, musicians and his famous powerful, heroic horses.

Asia House 63 New Cavendish Street London T +020 7307 5454 www.asiahouse.org

Until 13 August 2006 Carved by Nature: Untamed Traditions in Chinese Decorative Art Objects made from naturally twisted and contorted wood have been appreciated in China for millennia. These organic forms appealed to Buddhists and Daoists seeking to convey an attitude of humility and an affinity with nature.

In later centuries, scholar-aesthetes found the rustic features of the gnarled wood reminiscent of ancient trees that symbolized the wisdom of aging sages.

Until 17 September 2006 The Elegant Gathering: The Yeh Family ­Collection Presented in two eight-week installations, The Elegant Gathering features 80 superb examples of Chinese painting and calligraphy dating as far back as the 7th century – all selected from the Yeh Family Collection.

Asian Art Museum 200 Larkin St. San Francisco, California 94102 T +415-581 3500 www.asianart.org

Until 19 February 2007 House of Oracles: A Huang Yong Ping R­etrospective Working with diverse traditions and media, Huang Yong Ping has created an artistic universe comprised of provocative installations that challenge the viewer to reconsider everything from the idea of art, to national identity, to recent history. Huang’s sculptures and installations – drawing on the legacies of Joseph Beuys, Arte Povera, and John Cage as well as traditional Chinese art and philosophy – routinely juxtapose traditional objects or iconic images with modern references.

MASS MoCA 1040 MASS MoCA Way North Adams, Massachusetts 01247 T +413-662 2111 info@massmoca.org www.massmoca.org

textiles in many Indonesian societies are both literally and figuratively inter-woven with an individual’s life. This exhibition explores the imagery, forms and functions of one of the most important, widespread and technically sophisticated of all Indonesian textile traditions – the colourful and boldly patterned fabrics known as ikat. The exhibition includes ikat from several distinctive regional traditions.

> International arts agenda

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Agenda

Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan

Second International Summer School in Central Asia Organised by Kyrgyzstan-Turkey Manas ­University Contact: Samara Turdalieva summerschool@manas.kg www.summerschool.manas.kg

2-14 July 2006

Leiden, the Netherlands

IIAS Newsletter | #41 | Summer 2006

Redefining World Literatures Seminar Organised by the Departement of Literature, Faculty of Humanities, University of Indonesia Contact: Melani Budianta susatra_fibui@yahoo.com

Lancaster, United Kingdom

UK Association for Buddhist Studies Conference Contact: Ian Harris i.harris@ucsm.ac.uk or Ian Reader: i.reader@lancaster.ac.uk

5 July 2006

Utrecht, the Netherlands

16-29 July 2006

Beijing/Yulin, China

Joining Forces: Musical Fieldwork in China 11th CHIME Conference/Fieldwork Project Jointly organised by: Chime (European Foundation for Chinese Music Research), Music Research Institute Beijing, Shanghai Conservatory of Music, Yulin Cultural Bureau Contact: Frank Kouwenhoven chime@wxs.nl

10-14 July 2006

Edingburgh, United Kingdom

13th World Sanskrit Conference Conference Organised by International Association of Sanskrit Contact: John Brockington J.L.Brockington2ed.ac.uk www.arts.ed.ac.uk/sanskrit/13thWSC

Communities of Interpretation Burma Studies Conference Organised by Asia Research Institute Contact: Alyson Rozells bsc2006@nus.edu.sg www.ari.nus.edu.sg/conf2006/bsc2006.htm

Singapore

13-15 July 2006

Essen, Germany

GDPism and Risk: Challenges for Social ­Development and Governance in East Asia Conference Organised by: Centre for East Asian Studies, University of Bristol, UK East Asian Social Policy Research Network (EASP) Contact: Emma Holland Emma.Holland@brsitol.ac.uk www.bris.ac.uk/ceas/events/conferences/ gdp.shtml

China in the World 2006 Postgraduate Research Summer School: China and Globalisation in Historical ­Perspective Organised by Institute for Research on Contemporary China www.leeds.ac.uk/ChinaintheWorld

Nanjing, China

18–21 July, 2006

Islam and the Repositioning of the Region Summer academy Convenor(s): Georg Stauth and Armando Salvatore Organised by Institute of Advanced Studies Contact: Armin Flender armin@flender@kwi_nrw.de

16-30 July 2006

Bristol, United Kingdom

12-13 July 2006

Rotterdam, the Netherlands

7-14 July 2006

Rationalising China’s Place in Asia, 1800 to 2005 Conference Convenor(s): Zheng Yangwen & Liu Hong

Singapore, Singapore

3-4 August 2006

Annual Conference of the Association of Asian Performance (AAP) Contact: Kirstin Pauka pauka@hawaii.edu www.yavanika.org/aaponline

Chicago, United States

1-2 August, 2006

August 2006

Paleo-environments and Environmental Change in Asia Third Masterclass on Modern Research ­Techniques in Asian Archaeology Organised by L’Ecole Française d’Extrème ­Orient (L’EFEO) and IIAS Convenor: Franciscus Verellen (L’EFEO)

Paris, France

Yiwu, China China’s Agricultural Transition: Balancing RuralUrban Relations European Conference on Agriculture and Rural Development in China (ECARDC VIII) Organised by Rural Development Institute (RDI) and Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS)

18-21 September 2006

Inter-mediated Cross-border Marriages in Asia and Europe International Conference organised by the National Science Council (NSC), Taiwan and IIAS Convernors: Prof Yang Wen-shan and Prof Wim Stokhof Contact: Melody Lu M.Lu@let.leidenuniv www.iias.nl

Taipei, Taiwan

18-20 September 2006

Crime, Law and Order in the Japanese Empire, 1895-1945 Workshop Organised by NIOD indie-indonesie@niod.nl

Amsterdam, the Netherlands

14-15 September 2006

Of Asian Origin: Rethinking Tourism in ­Contemporary Asia Workshop Organised by Asia Research Institute Contact: Tim Winter ariwtc@nus.edu.sg www.ari.nus.edu.sg/conf2006/tourism.htm

Singapore

7-9 September 2006

ASEM @10/Phase 2: Connecting Civil Societies of Asia and Europe Conference Convenor(s): ASEF Organised by ASEF in co-operation with JCIE, University of Helsinki, EIAS and IIAS Contact: Natalia Figge natalia@asef.org www.asef.org

Helsinki, Finland

7-8 September 2006

31 August-2 September 2006

Central Asia in Retrospect and Prospect International Seminar Organised by Centre of Central Asian Studies, University of Kashmir mkaw@rediffmail.com

Srinagar, India

28-31 August 2006

11th Seminar Organised by International Association for Tibetan Studies Contact: P. Schwieger iats2006@uni_bonn.de www.iats2006.uni-bonn.de

Kuching, Malaysia Borneo in the New Century The Eighth Biennial Conference Organised by the Borneo Research Council (BRC) Contact: James Chin James.Chin@lycos.com or jchin@ieas.unimas.my www.borneoresearchcouncil.org

Königswinter/Bonn, Germany

31 July-1 August 2006

27 August-2 September 2006

Asia-Pacific Missionaries: At Home and Aboard Second biennual ANU missionary history ­conference Convenor(s): Australian National University Organised by NIAP ian.welch@anu.edu.au

Palembang, Indonesia Local Cultures and Its Manifestations in Nusantara Manuscripts Symposium Organised by MANASSA Contact: Titik Pujiastuti simposiummanassa2006@yahoo.com

Canberra, Australia

28-30 July 2006

25-26 August 2006

Arte-Polis: Creative Culture and the Making Place Seminar and workshop on urban culture Organised by Institute of Technology Bandung psud@melsa.net.id www.ar.itb.ac.id/artepolis

East-Osaka, Japan

Bali Summer School for Music and Dance Organised by Codarts, University of Professional Arts Education, Rotterdam Contact: Marianne Penning de Vries m.penning@codarts.nl www.codarts.nl

Tourism and the New Asia; Implications for Research, Policy and Practice Conference Contact: William Feighery wfeighery@beltourism.com www.pkutourism.com

Bandung, Indonesia

15-16 July 2006

Emerging Shape of East Asian Economic ­Community Conference Organised by Japan Academy for Asian Market Economies Contact: Takehito Onishi onishi@eco.kindai.ac.jp www.kindai.ac.jp

Beijing, China

21-23 July 2006

20-23 August 2006

ELNWS Intensive Seminar on Old Chinese ­Phonology Hosted by the CNWS, IIAS and Leiden University’s Faculty of Arts Convenor: Dirk Meyer D.Meyer@let.leidenuniv.nl

Entitled to Surrender: Reading Hindu Texts Interreligiously Lecture by Prof Francis X Clooney SJ (Harvard Divinity School, Boston/Cambridge) Convenor: Prof Norbert Hintersteiner (Comparative and Intercultural Theology), IIMO JBoere@theo.uu.nl

Leiden, the Netherlands

Depok, Indonesia

8-18 August, 2006

Tampere, Finland

Predictive Genetic Testing in Asia: Social-Science Perspectives on the Bioethics of Choice Special Symposium 8th WBC Convenor: Margaret Sleeboom-Faulkner Organised by IIAS m.sleeboom@wanadoo.nl www.iias.nl Perspectives on Eurasia Conference Organised by the Jean Monnet Centre of European Excellence, University of Tampere and the Centre for the Study of Mid-West and Central Asia, Panjab University Contact: Ms Tytti Erasto Tytti.Erasto@uta.fi

4-6 September 2006

Beijing, China

14-16 July 2006

Angkor – Landscape, City and Temple Organised by Department of Archaeology and the School of Geosciences Contact: Martin King angkor2006@acl.arts.usyd.edu.au conferences.arts.usyd.edu.au/index.php?cf=9

Sydney, Australia

18–23 July, 2006

September 2006

7-9 August 2006

19-20 July 2006

Cross-cultural Perspectives on the International Legal Order in the 21st Century ASEF Summer School Organised by ASEF and IIAS Contact: Ms Valerie Remoquillo valerie@asef.org www.iias.nl/au13 or www.asef.org

13-31 July 2006

July 2006

> International conference agenda www.rug.nl/cds/index www.ecardc.org/iias/show/id=40227

Organised by Asia Research Institute arizyw@nus.edu.sg & chsliuh@nus.edu.sg

Youth and the Global South: Religions, Politic, and the Making of Youth in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East Conference Convenor(s): The Steering Committee Organised by ASC/CODESRIA/ISIM/IIAS Contact: Manon Osseweijer m.osseweijer@let.leidenuniv.nl

Dakar, Senegal

13-15 October 2006

October 2006

CESS Annual Conference cessconf@fas.harvard.edu http://cess.fas.harvard.edu/CESS_Conference.html

Ann Arbor, United States

28 September-1 October 2006

New Asian Dynamics in Science, Technology and Innovation Nordic Conference Organised by NIAS-Nordic Institute of Asian Studies Contact: Erik Skaaning, Information & Seminar Co-ordinator erik@nias.ku.dk www.nias.ku.dk

Copenhagen, Denmark

27-29 September 2006

Culture and Commerce in the Indian Ocean Conference Convenor(s): Henk Niemeijer and Michael Pearson Organised by Leiden University and University of Technology, Sydney indian.ocean@uts.edu.au www.indianoceanproject.net

Leiden, the Netherlands

25-27 September 2006

From Distant Tales: Archaeology and Ethnohistory in the Highlands of Sumatra Workshop Organised by National University of Singapore and the Free University of Berlin Contact: Dominik Bonatz bonatz@zedat.fu-berlin.de

Berlin, Germany

21-23 September 2006

China and the World: Harmony and Peace Forum Organised by World Forum on China Studies Contact: Vivien Lee vivienlee_vivienlee@yahoo.com

Shanghai, China

21-22 September 2006

Lecturer: Dan Penny (School of Geosciences, University of Sydney, Australia) Contact: Manon Osseweijer iias@let.leidenuniv.nl www.iias.nl

> International conference agenda

Fellowships at the International Institute for Asian Studies

IIAS invites postdoctoral researchers to apply for

­fellowships in Leiden or Amsterdam. IIAS fellows are

institutions in the Netherlands. Fellows are expected

pean researchers, and make due reference to IIAS in

(future) publications, (partly) made possible through

Rotterdam, the Netherlands Cultural Diversity in Music and Dance Education Conference Organised by World Music and Dance Centre Rotterdam www.wmdc.nl

International Symposium on Asia-Pacific Studies Symposium Organised by Center for Studies on Asia and Oceania Contact: Ana Delia Soltura anadelia@ceao.co.cu

research done during your stay.

UC Berkeley Graduate Student Conference on Vietnamese Studies Organised by Center for Southeast Asia ­Studies cseas@berkeley.edu

Political and Economic Perspectives on ­Transboundary Environmental Issues in Insular Southeast Asia Workshop Organised by CAPAS, Academia Sinica and IIAS Contact: Gerard Persoon/Manon Osseweijer persoon@cml.leidenuniv.nl m.osseweijer@let.leidenuniv.nl www.iias.nl

The Japan Anthropology Workshop 18th Conference Organised by JAWS jaws-2007@khm.uio.no

April 2007 19-21 April 2007

Leiden, the Netherlands

22-25 November 2006

Quezon, Philippines 19th IAHA Conference

Oslo, Norway

14-17 March

March 2007

Queer Asian Sites Conference Convened by the AsiaPacifiQueer Network apq@anu.edu.au http://apq.anu.edu.au/

Sydney, Australia

Female Slavery, Orphanage and Poverty in the Portuguese Empire (XVI to XX Centuries) Conference Organised by Instituto Superior de Contabilidade e Administracao Contact: Clara Sarmento clara.sarmento@netc.pt www.iscap.ipp.pt/congresso2006

Porto, Portugal

20-22 November 2006

Berkeley, United States

Taipei, Taiwan

22-23 February 2007

9-10 February 2007

16-17 November 2006

February 2007

13-17 December 2006

Havana, Cuba

World Without Walls: Asia and the West Organised by Oriental Society of Australia (OSA) jocelyn.chey@arts.usyd.edu.au www.arts.usyd.edu.au/conference/OSA2006/

15-17 November 2006

November 2006

IIAS Newsletter | #41 | Summer 2006

ference details to www.iias.nl/portal/

online Agenda Asia by submitting your con-

conference in this newsletter and in the

You can increase public awareness of your

EUROSEAS Conference Organised by EUROSEAS Contact: Pietro Masina ofrattolillo@iuo.it http://iias.leidenuniv.nl/institutes/kitlv/ euroseas.html

Naples, Italy

12-15 September 2007

September 2007

ICAS 5 Conference Organised by University Kebangsaam Malaysia/ATMA-IKON Contact: Institute of Malay World and Civilization (ATMA) icas5@ukm.my www.atma.ukm.my/icas5.htm

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

2-5 August 2007

August 2007

China Summer School: “The Spread of PTH” Convenor(s): Marinus van de Berg and Vincent van Heuven Organised by LUCL/IIAS/NOW Contact: Marloes Rozing m.rozing@let.leidenuniv.nl www.iias.nl/ilci

Sydney, Australia

Leiden, the Netherlands 3-7 December 2006

13-15 July 2007

5th Urban Language Survey Seminar Seminar Convenor(s): Marinus van de Berg and Vincent van Heuven Organised by LUCL/IIAS/NOW Contact: Marloes Rozing m.rozing@let.leidenuniv.nl www.iias.nl/ilci

Leiden, the Netherlands

9-11 July 2007

July 2007

Production, Distribution and Collection of Sanskrit Manuscripts in Ancient South India Seminar Convenor(s): Saraju Rath Organised by IIAS and KU Leuven Contact: Saraju Rath and Marloes Rozing m.rozing@let.leidenuniv.nl

XVI International Conference on China, Chinese Civilisation and the World: History, Modernity and Future Prospects Organised by Russian Academy of Sciences, Institute of Far Eastern Studies ifes@cemi.rssi.ru

EU Relations with Taiwan and China Conference Organised by Academia Sinica Contact: Der-Chin Horng dchorng@sinica.edu.tw

Taipei, Taiwan

1 December 2006

December 2006

Christianity and Cultures: Japan and China in Comparison (1543-1644) Symposium Organised by Ricci Institute www.riccimac.org

Macau, China

30 November-2 December 2006

Organised by Philippines Social Sciences Council Contact: Filomeno V. Aguilar Jr iaha@pssc.org.ph

Moscow, Russia

25-27 October 2006

The Chinese in Vietnam: When Past and Future Converge Organised by Diasporas Chinoises research group IRSEA/UMR (UP/CNRS) Contact: Michel Dolinski, Université de ­Provence dolinski@up.univ-aix.fr or Jean Baffie, Administrative responsible « Diasporas Chinoises » and director of IRSEA Jean.Baffie@up.univ-mrs.fr.

Aix-en-Provence, France

20-21 October 2006

Third Biennial Conference of the Indian ­Association for Asian & Pacific Studies Contact: Lipi Ghosh iaaps2000@hotmail.com

Gwalior, India.

13-15 October 2006

> International conference agenda

[ a d v e r t i s e m e n t ]

Leiden or Amsterdam?

The IIAS main office in Leiden is hosted by Leiden University, which The IIAS branch office in Amsterdam is hosted by the University of

has a long tradition in Asian Studies. Its departments of languages Amsterdam (UvA). The university counts departments of Cultural

and cultures of China, Korea, Japan, South and Central Asia, and Anthropology, Sociology, Political Science, Communication Science,

Southeast Asia and Oceania all have extensive collections.

Media Studies and has an Academic Medical Center (AMC). Amster-

Leiden hosts the Research School CNWS (School of Asian, African dam has two universities. The Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VUA)

includes departments of Political Science, Social Cultural Sciences,

and Amerindian Studies), the Institute for the Study of Islam in the Social and Cultural Anthropology, and the VU University Medical Cent-

Modern World (ISIM), the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast er. Both UvA and VU have extensive department libraries in addition

offered office facilities, while the institute will medi-

Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV), the Faculty of Creative and Per-

forming Arts, the Faculty of Theology (with an emphasis on the theol-

to their main libraries.

ate in gaining access to libraries, archives and other

ogy of Islam), the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences with its

Asia-related institutes in Amsterdam include the Amsterdam School

departments of Cultural Anthropology, Development Sociology and

for Social Research (ASSR), Asian Studies in Amsterdam (ASiA), the

Political Science, the Institute of Environmental Sciences (CML), the

International Institute for Social History (IISG), the Netherlands Insti-

to be productive in writing, possibly give a lecture or

Van Vollenhoven Institute for Law, Governance and Development, and

tute for War Documentation (NIOD), The Amsterdam School for Cul-

organise a workshop, remain in contact with Euro-

the Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC). Asia-related museums

tural Analysis (ASCA) and the Royal Tropical Institute (KIT). As the

in Leiden include the National Museum of Ethnology and the Siebold-

(cultural) capital of the Netherlands, Amsterdam hosts many muse-

huis Museum. Leiden University is language oriented and focused on

ums, such as the Rijksmuseum and the Tropenmuseum of Anthro-

classical as well as contemporary studies.

plogy, and musical venues which feature Asia-related exhibitions and

In The Hague (15 minutes by train from Leiden) one can find the

performances. The departments in Amsterdam have a more interdisci-

plinary and comparative social science approach. Leiden and Amster-

Leiden University Campus The Hague (specialized in Law and Gov-

ernance Studies), the National Library of the Netherlands (KB), the

dam are 30 minutes apart by train.

Netherlands National Archives, the International Institute for Social

For more information and an application form see the IIAS website:

Studies (ISS) and the Netherlands Institute of International Relations,

www.iias.nl

­Clingendael.

For specific information, please contact:

iiasfellowships@let.leidenuniv.nl

39

Board

IIAS Extraordinary Chairs

IIAS Main Office Leiden

Wim Stokhof (Director)

Peter van der Veer - chairman (Utrecht University)

Henk Schulte Nordholt

P.O. Box 9515

Marise van Amersfoort (Trainee)

Barend ter Haar (Leiden University)

Special Chair at the Erasmus University Rotterdam

2300 RA Leiden

Amis Boersma (Project Coordinator)

Janny de Jong (Groningen University)

‘Asian History’

the Netherlands

Wouter Feldberg (Fellow Programme Coordinator)

Marcel van der Linden (IISG/University of Amsterdam)

1 October 1999 - 1 October 2007

Visitors: P.J. Veth 5th floor

Manuel Haneveld (IT-Manager)

Mario Rutten (University of Amsterdam)

Takeo David Hymans (Managing Editor)

Max Sparreboom (University of Amsterdam)

Hein Steinhauer

Leiden

Natasja Kershof (Editor)

Patricia Spyer (Leiden University)

Special Chair at Nijmegen University

T +31-71-5272227

‘Ethnolinguistics with a focus on Southeast Asia’

F +31-71-5274162

1 September 1998 - 1 September 2006

iias@let.leidenuniv.nl

> IIAS who & where

Staff

Staff

Jeroen de Kloet (Coordinator, Amsterdam)

Nonnensteeg 1-3

Heleen van der Minne (Secretary, Amsterdam)

Academic Committee

Heleen Oostebrink (Secretary)

Gerard Persoon - chairman (Leiden University)

Manon Osseweijer (Coordinator of Academic Affairs)

Touraj Atabaki (IISG/University of Amsterdam)

IIAS Branch Office Amsterdam

Anne-Marie Petit (Secretary)

Ellen Bal (Free University, Amsterdam)

Spinhuis

Joost Postma (Database Programmer)

Harm Beukers (Leiden University)

Oudezijds Achterburgwal 185

Anushka Premchand (Office Assistant)

Chris Goto-Jones (Leiden University)

1012 DK Amsterdam

Marloes Rozing (Seminars & Publications)

Peter Ho (University of Groningen)

the Netherlands

Josine Stremmelaar (Executive Manager)

Boudewijn Walraven (Leiden University)

T +31-20-5253657

Chaveli Ulitzsch (Trainee)

F +31-20-5253658

Paul van der Velde (Senior Consultant)

iias@fmg.uva.nl

Sikko Visscher (Project Manager, ASiA) Thomas Voorter (WWW)

[ a d v e r t i s e m e n t ]

> Colophon IIAS Newsletter #41 Summer 2006 Editors Takeo David Hymans & Natasja Kershof Guest editor International law?

Suzana Dudic Freelancers #41 Copyeditor: Lee Gillette Proofreader: Renata Jasaitis Illustrators: Chiara Dissette & Jiang Lidong

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www.iias.nl 40

IIAS Newsletter | #41 | Summer 2006